Cold Dish

by Craig Johnson

  “No companions, no tracks?”

  “Nope.”

  “Any cover?”

  My turn to smile. “That Powder River country, there’s a goodlookin’ woman behind every tree . . .” He joined me for the rest. “There just ain’t any trees.”

  “Back to square one. Wadding or contact dispersal?”

  “Nope. No powder tattooing, either.”

  “Any hope of brass?”

  “Ferg and that bunch didn’t come up with anything.”

  “Hmmm . . .” He grunted. “I will withhold comment on whether Ferg and his bunch could slap their ass with both hands.” He frowned at the frying pan, spooned the pooled grease into a measuring cup that he must have used to apportion tomato paste, and flipped the majority of the contents. “Meteorite?”

  I had to smile. “The more people I talk to, the more I am convinced that this may have been an act of God.”

  “Hate to see the Supreme Being take the fall for this one.”

  “He sees even the smallest sparrow fall.”

  “That would pretty much describe the decedent, but would this not be stretching the jurisdiction thing?”

  “Maybe.” The mood had lightened, and it was an opportunity that I couldn’t pass up. “Hey?”

  “Hmm?” He looked at me, and the expression his face carried was one of open concern for a friend who had all but accused him of impeding a murder investigation. My heart wasn’t in the question, but I had to ask. “You know the scuttlebutt on the Rez?”

  “What, you worried about the Indian vote?” He smiled to let me in on the joke, but it still hurt. “What?”

  “The Little Bird rape case . . .”

  “Melissa.”

  “Melissa.” I was feeling lower and lower. “What’s the general feeling on the Rez about the job I did?” There was a brief look of irritation as he flipped his hair back and trapped what would have been a fine tail on a good cutting horse in a leather strip he had pulled from the back pocket of his jeans.

  “General feeling”—he pointed up the phrase as silly white-man talk—“is that you could have done better.”

  “And what is the basis of my failure?”

  He turned his head and looked into the distance at the log wall only two feet away. “Two years suspended sentence, two years parole.”

  “People don’t think Vern Selby and a jury had something to do with that?”

  “These people do not have any bond with that judge or jury, none of whom were . . . Indian, and they do with you.” He paused. “You should take that as a grave compliment.” He opened a ziplocked bag of preshredded cheese and offered me some. I took a pinch and stuffed it in my mouth. Pepper jack. “Anyway, the goodwill of these people is not going to have much effect on your condition. There is only one person who can offer you absolution in this case, and he is a difficult individual with whom to deal . . . he forgives everyone but himself, and he never forgets.” We stood looking at each other, chewing. “You should go take a shower. Part three said she would be here for kickoff at two.” He pulled open the door of the oven and checked on his biscuits. The smell was marvelous.

  “Part three?”

  “Vonnie Hayes expressed a desire to participate in the bonding ritual this afternoon. I thought it might lead to a more desirable ritual between the two of you later this evening.”

  I took a moment to reply. “I just saw her yesterday morning. She didn’t say anything.”

  “Women seem to enjoy surprising you, perhaps because it is so easy.”

  I looked around the house at the piles of books and accumulated dirt on the floors, the walls, and the ceiling. “Oh, shit . . .”

  He followed my eyes and shook his head. “Yes, it is very bad, but we will tell her you are under construction. Red Road Contracting, the young men I told you about, will be here tomorrow morning.” He pulled the biscuits from the oven and placed them on one of the front burners. “Go take a shower.”

  I started, but turned. “What’s part four?”

  “Spirituality, but that may have to come from somebody else.”

  I turned the water on in the shower and spent the time waiting for it to heat up by inspecting my bullet holes. I had four: one in the left arm, one in the right leg, and two in the chest. I looked at the one in my left arm since it was the closest. It was 357/100ths of an inch with two clean, marbled white dots on either side. The one on the inside had well-defined edges and was about the size of a dime. On the other side it was blurred, had a tail like a tadpole that had drifted back to my elbow, and was about the size of a silver dollar. The water temperature was acceptable, so I stepped in and grabbed a bar of oatmeal soap that Cady had sent me. I liked it because it didn’t smell. I kicked at the slow contraction of the vinyl curtains.

  It was a monkey-shit brown Olds Delta 88 with two hubcaps and a peeling, blond vinyl top. I could see they were kids and just flipped the lights on for a second so they would pull over. It took what seemed like a little too long for them to do it. The driver threw open the door and started back toward the car I was using at the time; I figured he was upset because I had pulled him over for what seemed like nothing. I was wrong. He was upset because he and his friend had robbed a liquor store in Casper and had gotten away with $943 when I stopped them en route to Canada.

  I lathered up, rinsed off, and felt like I had new skin. I reached for the shampoo and, feeling how light the bottle was, made a mental note to get some more. I had enough unattended mental notes to fill up the Sears wish book.

  Near as we could figure, the bullet must have ricocheted off the window facing of the car and passed through my left arm. People always ask what it’s like, and the only answer I can come up with is that it’s like having a red-hot poker shoved into your flesh. It burns, and it hurts like hell, but only after. I wondered mildly if Vonnie would think that bullet holes are sexy. Martha didn’t; she hated them. A beautiful woman in my house; a woman who looked you over from head to toe, was confident and interested. I felt complicated and dreary.

  I wiped off the mirror to look into the eyes of Dorian Gray. What I saw did not inspire me with confidence. My hair, wet or dry, has a tendency to stand on end. I fought with it for a while and decided that it was a good thing I was able to wear a hat in my chosen profession. I have large, deep-set gray eyes, a gift from my mother, and a larger than normal chin, a gift from my father. The older I get, the more I think I look like a Muppet. Cady vehemently disagrees with this assessment, but she’s fighting her own battle with this particular gene puddle.

  It was with a great deal of panic that I heard a mixture of laughter resonate through the spaces at the top of the bathroom drywall and through the shower-curtained doorway. It was a quick right to the bedroom, maybe four feet, but I didn’t figure I could make it without being seen. I pulled the old black-watch pattern around my waist, slipped on my worn, moose-hide moccasins, and stepped into the cool, fresh dawn of interpersonal abuse.

  As usual, she looked magnificent. Long fingers were wrapped around one of my Denver Broncos mugs, the old one with the white horse snorting through the orange D. She wore a plain, khaki ball cap with her ponytail neatly tucked through the adjustable strap in the back, a gray sweatshirt that read VASSAR, blue jeans, and a pair of neon running shoes. She exuded health, sparkling intelligence, and sex, though the last might have just been my read on things. She sat on my foldout step stool and laughed as Henry tried vainly to adjust the reception on my television.

  “All right, I give up. What the hell do you have to do to get a decent picture on this thing?”

  We had always watched the game at the bar on Henry’s satellite-assisted television but, for today’s game, he had thought it best to view it within the comfortable confines of my house. He was kneeling by the set, adjusting the fine tuning with the same finesse he had shown with the fuse box two nights ago. “That is decent.”

  He turned to regard the screen as the usual blobs moved about in indiscriminate pa
tterns. “You have got to be kidding.”

  I crossed the room and leaned against a six-by-six. “Vonnie, welcome to Château Tyvek.”

  “Is this the uniform of the day?”

  Henry was right; I was going to have to make some changes. “Oh, this was just a little something I threw on.” I looked at the Cheyenne Nation. “What’s the score?”

  He stood with his hands on his hips as two vague football helmets collided and exploded into a million pieces on the screen amid triumphant musical accompaniment. “It hasn’t started yet. Is it me or has football gotten more and more like wrestling these days?”

  She squeezed my hand. “Bear says he doesn’t mind Native American mascots for athletic teams.” I noticed he didn’t correct her use of the term Native American.

  “I don’t have a problem with native accoutrements. If they wish to use the tools of our trade to strike fear into their enemies’ hearts, who am I to deny them?”

  This from the man who had worn a horse-head amulet around his neck for four years in Southeast Asia. Chinese Nung Recon teams and Montagnards believed it had been carved from the sternum of an unfortunate NVA colonel. Henry had done nothing to dissuade them from this thought, and only he and I knew the bone had come from the leg of his mother’s old, dry dairy cow that they had had to put down. “How’s lunch coming?”

  “Who am I, Hop-Sing here?” He opened the oven door and peered in. “Almost there. Plenty of time for you to go put some clothes on.”

  Her hand trailed after mine as I started for the bedroom. “Don’t go to any trouble on my part.”

  I continued into the bedroom so she wouldn’t see how red my face was growing. I looked around the room and saw my life as it was. The edges of the mattress were threadbare and dirty, the sheets an uninviting gray. A battered gooseneck lamp sat on the floor beside the bed with a copy of Doctor Dogbody’s Leg opened to page seventy-three, where I had left it a while ago. The ever-present beer boxes loomed at the far wall, and the naked light bulbs allowed none of the low-rent squalor to escape. It was like living in an archeological dig. I thought about the woman in the other room and felt like climbing out the window. Instead, I went over to the crate that stood as my bedside table and punched the button just below the flashing red light on the answering machine. Evidently, I hadn’t heard it ring.

  “Okay, so, after forty-eight hours of intensive ballistic study, we’re no fucking closer than we were at the beginning of the weekend.” She sounded ragged and edgy, and I was glad I was five hours away. “The cast content on the ballistics is fairly soft; 30 to 1, lead to tin.” She took a breath. “Here’s the kicker. There’s some kind of strange chemical compound . . . You remember those old Glaser Safety Slugs? The GSS’s? If that’s the case, Cody was SOL.”

  Shit out of luck.

  “So, can you imagine somebody tracking that kid down with Teflon slugs?”

  No.

  “Yeah, well me neither.” There was a pause. “Anyway, I’ve done all that I can do here, and the pizza at Larry’s sucks. So, I’ll be home tomorrow. Any questions?”

  I stared at the phone machine and shook my head side to side.

  “Good. I’m taking tomorrow off. Any problem with that?”

  I continued to shake my head.

  “Good.” Pause. “Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow anyway.”

  When I entered the kitchen, Henry was holding the photographs that had been in the envelope at arms length.

  “You need new reading glasses or longer arms?”

  “Both.”

  Vonnie was glancing at the television and questioning him. “Twenty-five percent of all domestic murders go unsolved each year?” She shifted on the stool and smiled at me.

  I poured myself another cup of coffee and extended the pot toward her. She shook her head and waited to capture my next words with those eyes. “About five thousand cases go unsolved.” Her eyes widened. “About sixty-two percent of homicides in the United States involve firearms, which means me and my compadres have failed to identify some thirty-one hundred killers and their weapons every year.”

  “Seems like the guys on TV and in the movies always get their man; you real cops must be falling down on the job.” He lowered the photographs, and I noticed Vonnie made no effort to look at them.

  “Personally, I never miss an episode of Dragnet.”

  She cocked her head, and the eyes narrowed. “It seems like a lot. It was Sheriff Connally here before you, wasn’t it?” She grinned and looked off toward the front door.

  “You know Lucian?”

  “Oh, I had a few run-ins with him back in my bad old days.” She laughed, flashing that canine tooth that sparkled like a Pepsodent commercial. “Some of my posse and I had absconded with a fifth of my father’s Irish whiskey and high-tailed it to the Skyline Drive-In in Durant.”

  Henry perked up. “I think I heard about that. Didn’t you and Susan Miller dance naked on the hood of that ’65 Mustang during Doctor Zhivago?”

  She was turning just a little pink at the throat. “I was of a young and impressionable age.”

  “Hell, I would have been impressed too.” He stuffed the photographs back into the envelope and handed them to me. “Good luck.”

  Her smile went away. “You don’t think it was an accident?”

  “Not really.” Henry crossed behind me and opened the refrigerator door to pull out a pitcher I had never seen before, filled with a murky maroon liquid, ice cubes, and lemon and orange slices. I sat the envelope down on the counter and stared at it. “I’m hoping real hard that it is, but evidence is mounting that such is not the case.”

  “Why?”

  “Short-range weapon did the deed, no way you could sneak up on somebody out there. I’d hazard to guess that there aren’t many hunters looking to shoot pronghorn or mule deer with a 12 gauge. And there are some things that just don’t make sense.”

  He stirred the contents of the pitcher. “Powder burns.”

  She was following, but I figured I should explain the details. “When you shoot a shotgun at any range . . .” I paused and weighed the next question. “You know what a shotgun is?”

  Her eyes stayed steady to show no offense. “My father used to shoot skeet.”

  “Right. Well, this is looking like a rifled slug.”

  “Slug. Doesn’t sound pleasant.”

  “It’s not. Slugs basically convert shotguns into oversize rifles with enough power to crack automobile engine blocks.”

  “Why would somebody want to shoot somebody with something like that?”

  “Emphasis.”

  It rumbled in his chest, and I wondered about all the people who would consider it a good thing that the world was shed of Cody Pritchard. “Cody wasn’t exactly beloved by the . . .” I gave him a sidelong glance. “Indian community.”

  She placed a hand on the counter to get his attention. “It’s not Indian anymore, it’s Native American. Right, Bear?” She nodded for confirmation.

  He looked up and pursed his lips sagely. “That is right.” He turned his head toward me ever so slightly. “You must learn to be more responsive to Native American sensibilities.”

  Bastard. “The problem is the slug decreases the range of an already relatively short-range weapon.”

  “But wasn’t he shot in the back?”

  “Yep, but you’d still have to get close.”

  “Could he have been drunk or asleep?”

  “Drunk, certainly.” Henry wandered over to look at the blobs moving in the television. I had forgotten about the game. “Even with the complications of extensive tissue damage, his posture was likely erect. And since Henry was the last to serve him food and see him alive, I can take his word that Cody was at least capable of driving his truck and walking.”

  She turned her stool. “You saw him last?”

  He stared at the television screen, his arms crossed. “Do not ask me how I can tell, Walt, but I think your team is winning.”

  She
turned back to look at me, then back to him again. “Bear, have I said something wrong?”

  “No, you did not say anything wrong . . . We will just say that I was the next to last person to see Mr. Pritchard alive.” He smiled to himself and crossed back to the counter. “Sangria, anybody?” He poured the liquid into three tall glasses and handed one to each of us. “How about a toast?” He raised his glass. “Here is to the three thousand one hundred that get away.”

  “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.”

  I looked into the big, brown eyes with wisps of butterscotch slipping by. “To Doctor Zhivago.”

  The game was uneventful and, as near as we could tell, the Broncos won by two field goals. By six-thirty we had dispatched the casserole, and Henry had made excuses that he had to go check on the bar. At the moment, I was massaging Vonnie’s foot from the opposite stool, with the gentle warmth of what remained of the sangria seeping into every relaxing muscle in my body. It had been one of those spectacular Wyoming sunsets, the ones everybody thinks only happen in an Arizona Highways magazine. Broiling waves of small bonfires leapt on top of one another as far as the horizon with injured purples drifting in multilayered, frozen sheets back to the skyline.

  “So, I didn’t hurt his feelings?”

  “No, I can guarantee that wasn’t it.” Her toenails were burgundy; the color matched the sangria, and I figured she had them done in Denver on a regular basis.

  “You must know him best?”

  I thought about what knowing Henry Standing Bear best meant and that that opened up a lot of country. “I don’t know about best.” I paused for a moment, but it wasn’t enough for her. “About ten years ago we were over in Sturgis for that motorcycle fiasco that they have every year. They put out this desperate plea for assistance and, if you’re an off-duty police officer, you can make a lot of money in one weekend. I was saving for Cady, to get her a car, and figured an extra thousand wouldn’t hurt. Henry hadn’t ever been over for the big wingding, so he decided to tag along. So, we’re sitting there at this little greasy spoon near the motorcycle museum the morning after, and I’m telling Henry that if I ever get this bright idea again to just slap me in the back of the head with a stilson wrench. That’s when this Indian fellow . . .”