Junkyard Dogs

by Craig Johnson

  “She didn’t make her bed, and there was a cat.”

  I moved to the back and looked at another door that must’ve led to a cellar. “Anything upstairs?”

  “Another unmade bed and a poster of Jessica Simpson. There’s a bathroom up there, and two toothbrushes in the mug on the sink. The amount of hair product leads me to believe it’s two women.”

  I glanced back at the computer in the living room. “You see the screen saver?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How long before the screen on those things goes to black?”

  She shook her head as she considered my absolute lack of knowledge concerning computers. “It’s adjustable; you can set them so that it’s on all the time.”

  “Oh.” She continued to look at me as I glanced out the back door into the partial darkness. There were large drifts of snow and, like the Dobbs driveway, it looked like a frozen sea. I couldn’t see any tracks in the reflected light. I turned my attention to the cellar door. “I’m trying to learn about the damn things.”

  “Yes, and we’re all so very proud of you.”

  I turned the unlocked knob and swung the basement door open, and it was at that point that someone shot a full load of pepper spray in my face.

  “Yeah, he pulled the knob loose on the basement door and then slammed into the cabinets and knocked them off the wall. Then he broke through the back door into the yard; took the storm door with him.”

  I had my head in a tray with running water going into both eyes, so I was limited to what I could hear of the conversation. David Nickerson was working the night shift at Durant Memorial when Vic had brought me in. “So, you didn’t apply the snow?”

  “Hell no, the fucker’s six foot five and weighs two hundred and fifty pounds so I just got out of the way. You should have heard the noises coming out of him; you know those old Frankenstein movies where the villagers chase after the creature with torches and set him on fire? It was like that.”

  The doctor straightened the bib on my chest and laughed but with a degree of professionalism. “He’s lucky he got his eyes closed—that was some pretty potent stuff she got him with.”

  “It wasn’t pepper spray?”

  He laughed a little more. “Yes, but it’s a dosage meant for bears.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Well, it’s not going to do any good for that tear in his eyeball.” I could see a blur as he leaned down to check the water flow. “That was smart thinking, getting out in the snow. Did he rub?”

  “No. After the pinball effect in the kitchen, he hit the ground in the backyard and just kept throwing snow in his face. He was having a little trouble breathing and there was the topical irritation, but all in all it was pretty much textbook.”

  “How long did it take you to get him here?”

  “Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty.” I heard her move, and her voice came from another part of the room. “How’s the girl?”

  The young doctor turned off the taps, moved the device, and adjusted the table on which I was lying until it felt level. “I think she’s fine. She banged her head and bruised her back when she fell. We’re going to keep her overnight to make sure she’s okay.” I closed my eyes and kept them closed. “Now, did she fall down the basement steps immediately after she sprayed the sheriff?”

  “Yeah, we were both trying to get away from him. There’s a life-preservation thing that kicks in with us little animals when the big animals run amok.”

  He chuckled. “You seem unharmed.”

  “Hey, fuck you. It was like the running of the bulls at Pamplona.” Her voice was light, and I could tell they were having a good time, regardless of my expense. “What was I supposed to do? Shoot him and put him out of his misery?”

  I’d had about enough, raised a hand, and started to get up. The doc caught my shoulder and helped me. “How are you doing, Sheriff?”

  I opened my eyes just a little and couldn’t see much better than when they were closed. “Do you have anything for a headache?”

  “Lots of things.” His voice changed directions. “Can you keep him here till I get back? It’ll just take a minute.”

  Vic’s hands clasped my shoulder and steadied me as the curtain swished aside and the doctor’s footsteps diminished across the tile of the emergency room. “How you doin’, big guy?”

  I cleared my throat and coughed. “What . . .” I coughed some more. “The hell . . .” I coughed again. “Was she thinking?”

  Vic laughed, and I fought the urge to rub my eyes.

  “Did I not call her sister’s name enough times? Did I not say ‘Walt Longmire, Absaroka County Sheriff’s Department’ enough times?”

  I opened my eyes a little more and could just see Vic, who was standing very close to me. “She says that’s the same thing the last guy who came into the house said.”

  I took a few breaths. I’d heard a little of the conversation in the truck but hadn’t been in any condition to really listen. “Other guy.”

  “The one who took her sister about twenty minutes before we got there.”

  I took another breath. “Where is Claudia?”

  “In the next room.”

  I stood, and Vic kept a hand on my arm. “The doctor said for you to not go anywhere.”

  “It’s his hospital, he can probably find us.” I opened my eyes fully and was just about blind out of my left. “In the land of the blind . . .”

  With Vic’s help, I made my way to another curtained room where a teenage girl was seated on one of the gurneys.

  “Oh, my gawd, I am so sorry.” Her voice was familiar as were the words. As near as I could tell, it was what she had repeated the entire trip here. “I am so sorry, oh my gawd.”

  Vic pulled a chair for me from the wall. “It’s okay. I’m all right.”

  “You look horrible.”

  “It’s okay, I normally look this way.”

  She began crying and as much as I could make out, she looked like she was about seventeen. “I am so sorry.”

  I cleared my throat. “Claudia, I need to ask you some questions about your sister.”

  She nodded vigorously. “Okay.”

  “She was abducted?”

  “Yes. I mean, you guys don’t think this is a joke or something? You think this is serious, right?”

  I waited but didn’t answer her question. “Could you tell me what happened?”

  “Yeah. Um . . . We were watching television and saw the headlights of somebody coming up the driveway, so Carla gets up and goes to the door. I guess she must’ve opened it before whoever it was got there, and I heard her ask if she could help them, then they said something about the sheriff’s department. Well, I got up when I heard that because it was my job this year to get the renewal stickers on the plates and I still hadn’t done it.” She looked at me. “Do you guys go from house to house about that?”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “Well, I started out front where they were, but he already had her.”

  I leaned in a little. “He?”

  “Yeah. That would be important, huh? Yeah, he had hold of her and was dragging her outside.”

  “Could you see him, make an identification?”

  She shook her head. “No, he was wearing one of those masks like a terrorist.”

  “A ski mask.”

  “Yeah.” She thought about it. “Do you think it was Al Qaeda?”

  “Probably not.” I cleared my throat and concentrated once again on not rubbing my eyes or looking at Vic. “What did you do?”

  “I ran back into the house and grabbed the bear spray that we keep in the kitchen cabinet, but then . . . I guess I got scared and hid in the basement.”

  “Did this person come back in the house?”

  “No, I don’t think so. I just was so scared that I stayed there next to the door with the pepper spray and waited.” She started crying again. “Oh gawd, I am so sorry.”

  “Did your sister have any enemies, any new acquaint
ances or anything like that?”

  “No.”

  “You’re certain?”

  “Yeah, I mean, neither of us have boyfriends. You know?”

  I nodded along with her. “So, was he big?”

  She nodded. “Yeah, almost as big as you.”

  “Heavyset or muscular?”

  She took a deep breath and thought. “He had a lot of clothes on, so I couldn’t say.”

  “What kind of clothes?”

  “Dark, they were just dark. I don’t know, just clothes; a coat.”

  “What kind of coat?”

  She shrugged, embarrassed. “Lumpy?”

  I continued to nod back at her, trying to keep her from getting frustrated and shutting down. “What was his voice like?”

  “Rough, I think, but he wasn’t saying a whole lot once he got hold of my sister; just a lot of grunting and stuff.” She twisted her arms and legs together.

  The interview was interrupted by the doctor, returning with a couple of pills in one of those paper cups and a root beer. Evidently, Isaac Bloomfield had told the young man about my habits. “Thanks.”

  I popped the tablets into my mouth and opened the root beer. “Was there anything else about his appearance that might’ve been distinctive? Anything at all?” I sipped the soda and felt the horse pills go down.

  Claudia Lorme’s face, or what I could see of it, looked sad. “No, I don’t think so.”

  Very early the next morning, Dog watched as I staggered from the bench in the office reception area, stumbled over my blanket, and answered the phone. It was David Nickerson saying that during the morning rounds, when he’d checked on Claudia, she had come up with a distinctive aspect of the abductor’s appearance.

  I leaned on Ruby’s desk and widened my eyes against the pain. A little flat light was shining through the windows to the east, and the thin fingers of the tree limbs looked as if they were intertwined in an attempt to hold on to whatever warmth there might’ve been out there. “What’s that?”

  There was a brief pause, and the young doc jostled the phone. “She says his thumb was bandaged.”

  13

  Saizarbitoria had the misfortune of the first watch and had walked in with a fancy cup of coffee from the kiosk out by the new Wishy-Washy Laundromat at a little before seven. I couldn’t see much, and my face still felt like it might fall off, so he drove my truck up the mountain.

  “So, do you think Felix Polk kidnaps Carla Lorme because she sees him answering the phone at the bar?”

  “Yep.”

  “Which means that Felix Polk is the one who received Ozzie Dobbs’s phone call just before somebody shot him, which places Mr. Polk at the top of our to-do list?”

  “Yep.”

  “Because he’s the only guy we know of who is missing a thumb?”

  “Yep.”

  He slowed as we made the steep grade alongside North Ridge and toward Grouse Mountain—the snow piled on the side of the road was almost at the top of the twelve-foot reflector poles. It was early, and there was no one else on the road. “So, how long have you known who the thumb belonged to?”

  I fessed up. “Since day one. Felix Polk came in and asked for his thumb back.”

  “So why did you have me running all over the place trying to find out whose it was when you already knew?”

  I opened my eyes and sort of looked at him. “I was trying to give you something to do until something else came along.” He didn’t look back at me but continued to stare out the windshield.

  I could see his mouth moving as he thought, but he didn’t say anything out loud. I looked through the side window. I was tired and my eyes hurt, but my mind was like a dynamo and refused to curl up and lie down. I took another breath and glanced at Saizarbitoria. You can’t see things like what I’d seen and not have it change you, any more than the Basquo could have what happened to him and think it wouldn’t change him.

  When my eyes refocused, he was looking at me as if I’d said something.

  “What?” His face remained immobile, and he turned back to the fog-blanketed road. “You said something. What’d you say?”

  “Stay alive.”

  His eyes drifted halfway between the windshield and me. “What?”

  “I said ‘stay alive,’ and I don’t just mean physically. Don’t let this one instance rob you of who you are and of everything you’ve got.”

  He leaned forward, peering through the gloom as if concentration would block my words. Neither of us said anything more, until I pointed out the barricaded roadway that led into the canyon where Felix Polk’s cabin sat.

  “The gate’s locked.” The air was cold but felt good on the scoured skin of my face.

  “Looks like we walk in.” I gestured back to Dog still seated in the backseat but poised to jump in the front if I opened the door. “Stay.”

  We tromped around the pipe blockade the Forest Service made the private property owners erect and started down the lane. The snow was piled high on either side where he must’ve used the front blade on the Jeep to keep the roadway passable. There were two tracks from Polk’s Wagoneer running down the center, and the Basquo and I took a tread apiece to keep the slogging to a minimum.

  The humidity in the air had frozen on all the surfaces of the trees, and it was like some forest prism. “The tracks look relatively fresh, if the snow’s been steady.”

  Sancho nodded. “Yeah.”

  At least he was trying.

  There was a larger opening farther down the road and a spot where you could turn around if you had to, then the darkened archway that led along Caribou Creek.

  “How far to the place?”

  “About a hundred yards, up on the right against the canyon wall.”

  He looked around. “Lots of trees.”

  “Yep.”

  “You want to split off and come up from the back, and I’ll head straight in?”

  I stopped for a moment and flipped the collar up on my jacket—the snow was filtering through the ground fog. The two of us stood there with our breath hovering in our faces. “Nope.”

  “How come?”

  “Because my foot hurts, I’m tired, and my face still feels like I’ve been bobbing for French fries.”

  He shrugged. “You want me to hike in and go in the back?”

  “Nope.” I gave the Basquo what I thought was a gentle smile, but with the amount of feeling I had in my features, who knew what I looked like. “He’s just a fellow who broke into a garage to steal his own truck thirty years ago and had the misfortune of pinching his thumb off in a log splitter. He might be the guy we’re looking for and, then again, he might not.”

  Sancho nodded and pulled at the black hair on his chin. “Your call.”

  We both listened to the wind as it clawed its way over the top of the canyon. “We’ll go straight in.”

  The trail led slightly uphill and turned a little so that we couldn’t see the cabin. There were some logs along the road where Polk must’ve cut up some of the dead standing trees but had yet to haul them to the splitter.

  Saizarbitoria was working with younger legs, but I had the inside curve, and we approached the Wagoneer at about the same time. The vehicle was parked in the center of the road with the bladed front pointed toward the cabin.

  There was eight inches of snow on the hood, and I felt the surface where the heat had melted the snow to a skin of ice under the accumulation of powder. I looked up and took a reading on the flakes hanging in the air between us—ten, twelve hours at the least since the vehicle had been moved. That would’ve put it in the abduction ballpark.

  “What are you thinking?”

  I looked at the Basquo and glanced up at the shadow of the cabin, where you could see the overhang of the porch. “Could be he plowed this road last night so that he’d be able to get out this morning.”

  “Could also be that he was out kidnapping bartenders.”

  “Could be.” I wiped the snow from a side window b
ut couldn’t see a ski mask lying there or Carla Lorme. “Could be not.”

  The wind was grazing the tops of the trees, causing them to undulate like hula dancers. The snow was sifting through the low-flying clouds, and it hung in the air like glitter.

  “What the hell are you people doin’ out there?!”

  So much for sneaking up on the man.

  “Mr. Polk, it’s Walt Longmire.”

  “The sheriff ?”

  “Yes, sir. You mind if we come up?”

  He laughed. “Well, you better, before you get so covered up with snow that you can’t move.”

  I didn’t look at Sancho but continued past the Wagoneer and toward the cabin. He trailed behind me and soon we were standing on the porch, which was covered with piles of snow curving over the gutters like hanging avalanches.

  Felix Polk was dressed in what appeared to be his daily uniform—Carhartt overalls, thermals, and a flannel shirt/ jacket. I noticed he was in his stocking feet. “You here to sell tickets to the sheriff’s ball?”

  I smiled at the old joke and gave the standard reply. “We don’t have balls.”

  “That’s too bad for you. Come on in.”

  We stepped into the living room of the cabin and the immediate warmth of the fireplace to our left. There were three doors adjacent to the main room, two bedrooms to the left, and a bathroom in the back and to our right; all the doors were open. “Mr. Polk, this is my deputy, Santiago Saizarbitoria.”

  The man did not, I noticed, stick his hand out to Sancho. “That’s a mouthful. You Mexican?”

  Sancho studied the Nazi flag over the fireplace, looked at me, and then pointedly at Felix Polk. “Basque.”

  The machinist looked unsure. “What’s that?”

  I answered. “High-altitude Mexican.”

  He still looked puzzled and gestured to the kitchen. “Coffee?”

  “Oh, just more than life itself.”

  We followed him, and I thought I might have seen something stuffed at the small of his back. Polk poured us a few mugs and sat at his kitchen table as he had previously when I’d enlisted his help in my intrigues. “What’s wrong with your face?”

  I tipped my hat back and unbuttoned my coat. “I had a little adventure with some pepper spray.”