Cold Dish

by Craig Johnson

  “Something?”

  He handed me back the baggie and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I could tell you, but I’d rather show you.”

  “You’re that sure?”

  He looked at the pointed toes of his handmade, belly-cut, alligator-skin Paul Bond boots. “I’m that sure.”

  I ran through the rest of my day. “After 5:30?”

  He looked again to the sky above Cloud Peak. “Tomorrow morning would be better, Sheriff. I’ve got a business to run.”

  “What time?”

  “Doesn’t matter, I’m always up.”

  By the time I got back to the office, a green Dodge with a flat bed and fifth wheel was pulled up to the building, and the woman in the front seat made a point of not seeing me as I went in. Barbara Keller did not believe her child was guilty and never would. I went in the office and motioned for the two men to follow me. “Get you fellas some coffee?” Jim Keller shook his head, and Bryan studied his hands. “You sure? It’s been brewing since about eight this morning. Should be about right.”

  “How can we help you, Walt?” Of all the young men in the group, I had found it the hardest to believe that Bryan had been involved with the rape. I wasn’t sure if he had always looked so sad or if the look had just intensified since the trial. “Jim, you own that land out next to the BLM where Bob Barnes runs Mike Chatham’s sheep?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s where we found Cody Pritchard.” I glanced at Bryan. “You didn’t have any contact with him in the last couple of weeks, did you?”

  “He has not.” I turned to look at Jim. Jim in turn looked at Bryan, who in turn looked at his hands. “Have you?”

  Bryan found his hands even more interesting. “No, sir.”

  “Jim, your wife is looking a little upset out there in your outfit, maybe you ought to go check on her?”

  He gave Bryan another look. “You tell this man anything he wants to know, and you better damn well tell him the truth.”

  I let the directive settle till the front door quietly shut. Bryan Keller was a handsome kid with wide cheekbones, a strong chin, and a small, hooked scar at the jawline. He had taken life on, and life had kicked his ass. I looked at the young wreck and felt sad too. “Bryan?” The jolt was two staged, and his eyes briefly met with mine. “Did you have any contact with Cody?”

  “No, sir.”

  “None at all?”

  “No, sir.”

  I believed him. Shells don’t lie, mostly. I stretched and laced my fingers behind my head. “Have you had anything to do with him since the trial?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Are you aware of any threats that might have been made toward him? Any enemies he might have had?” This got a brief exhale. “Other than the obvious?”

  “I’d liked to have killed the son of a bitch.”

  I couldn’t help but raise my eyebrows. “Really?”

  His eyes darted back to his hands. “Is sayin’ that gonna get me into trouble?”

  “No more than the rest of us.” I went out into the reception area and poured myself a cup of coffee. “You sure you won’t have some? It really isn’t that bad.” He said okay, probably because I asked him twice and he had been taught that if somebody asks you something twice you say yes, no matter what it is. It looked like a heated conversation going on in the truck out front, and I thought about my child. I don’t know how you get them to make right choices, how you keep them from ending up like the two-parent pileup that was sitting in my office.

  I brought Bryan his coffee and sat down in the chair beside him, taking off my hat and tossing it onto the desk. My gun belt was digging into my side, but I was ignoring it. We were both ignoring it. I sipped my coffee. “Bryan . . . Just for the record, I don’t think you killed Cody Pritchard . . . As I recall, your statements and testimony indicated that you didn’t participate in the rape.”

  “I didn’t.” His eyes welled up, and I wished I washed cars for a living.

  “You were only convicted as an accessory, with suspended sentence.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, that’s a good thing.”

  He took a sip of his coffee and made a face. “There are days when I just can’t stand it.” He was crying openly, and I watched the tears stripe his face and drip onto his shirt.

  “Stand what?”

  He wiped his face with the sleeve of his Carhartt. “People . . . the way they look at me . . . like I’m not worth shit.”

  “Well, at the risk of sounding trite, I guess it’s up to you to prove them wrong.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Stop yes-sirring me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I bought shampoo on the way home. When I got there, the substructure of a porch ran the entire distance of the cabin. Six six-by-sixes stood unflinching in the growing wind, and the little red Jeep was gone.

  5

  I left the house around 5:30 in the morning and succeeded in avoiding Red Road Contracting and Henry. I wasn’t sure if he was going to make me run two days in a row, but I didn’t want to risk it. It was partly cloudy, but the sun was making a valiant attempt at clearing the sky, and it promised to be warmer than it had been in the last few days. I sometimes thought about moving south, following the geese, shooting through the pass at Raton, and seeing if there were any sheriff openings in New Mexico. Good Mexican food was hard to come by north of Denver. I liked Taos, but Hatch was probably my speed.

  I took 14 to Lower Piney and cut across 267 to Rock Creek, slowly tacking my way up the foothills. I thought about Vonnie and missed her a little bit. It was probably way too early for that. I was going through that little bit of worry that I had said or done something wrong and that she might not want to see me again. I saw me every day, and I wasn’t so sure I was that fond of my company. I promised myself that I would call her up and make a real date, maybe a lunch of lessening expectations.

  As far as I knew, Ruby hadn’t gotten any response from the Espers. I was going to have to swing out to their place and square things up on the way back from Omar’s unless I radioed in and got Vic to do it. With Turk back in Powder, I was shorthanded. I thought about Turk and forced my train of thought elsewhere. It was a big train. I waited till I got to the top of one of the ridges to tell Ruby to send Ferg out to the Esper place. She reminded me that I hadn’t taken my sweatpants and that Vic’s feelings were probably going to be hurt.

  “Is she there?”

  “Talking on the phone with Cheyenne.”

  “This early? Well, tell her that the evidence stuff is on my desk from . . .”

  “She’s already got that.”

  “Oh.” I waited for a moment, but she didn’t continue. “Anything you need from me?”

  “Like where you are?”

  “Yep, like that.”

  “No, we don’t care.” I thought I heard someone laughing in the background, but I wasn’t sure.

  Palace Omar was made of logs, same as mine, but that was where the likeness ended. Unlike Vonnie’s, you had to park in a circular holding area after being buzzed through the gate, which was about a mile back down the asphalt road. No one said anything, but the gate had slowly risen, and I smiled and waved at the little black video camera. I looked up at the house and wondered how many cameras were on me now. The place was impressive, as multimillion-dollar mansions go. The architects from Montana had used a combination of massive hand-hewn logs and architectural salvage to produce a combination of old and new and all expensive.

  I knocked and made faces at the security camera at the door, but no one answered. Entering Omar’s house unannounced was less than appealing, but I could hear a television blaring in the depths of the structure and decided to risk it. I pushed open the doors, listened to the satisfied thump as the metal cores closed, and walked into the two-story atrium that made up the entryway. I counted the mounted heads that were hung down the great hallway to the kitchen in the back. There were twenty-three. I knew t
he inside of the house pretty well; I had followed Omar and Myra through the majority of it while listening to their running, psychosis-ridden monologues on how they were going to kill each other.

  As I made my way toward the kitchen, the sound from the TV became more distinct, and I was pretty sure some pretty dramatic lovemaking was going on. Obviously Omar got a lot better reception than I did. When I got there, Jay Scherle, Omar’s head wrangler, was standing at the counter and watching a watered-down version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which I gathered was taking place in a hayloft somewhere. Every time the leading lady became overcome with passion, the camera would drift to the casually billowing curtains at a window. Jay was dressed for work, complete with chaps and spurs. I asked if Omar was up. His eyes didn’t leave the screen. “I’ve worked here for seven years, and I’ve never seen the son of a bitch sleep.”

  I nodded and watched Jay watch the flip-down flat screen that was hung under the kitchen cabinets. I wasn’t sure if D. H. Lawrence would have recognized his work, but the plastic surgeon specializing in breast enhancement would have recognized his.

  “Where is he?”

  “Out back, getting set up.”

  I looked at the screen, a curtain again. “Set up for what?”

  “Hell if I know . . . took a pumpkin with him.” After a moment, he spoke again. “You ever seen a barn with so many damn curtains?”

  I walked through the french doors Jay had indicated with his chin, across an expansive deck, and down a stone walkway to a courtyard walled in by four feet of moss rock topped with Colorado red granite, but I didn’t see Omar. I was about to go back in when I noticed a couple of sand bags, shooter’s glasses, and a spotting scope laying on the picnic table at the other side of the wall. My eyes continued up, and I saw Omar at the foot of a hill about a quarter mile away. He had been watching me and slowly raised his hand. I wasn’t sure if it was an invitation, but I started walking, my breath still blowing clouds of mist into the warming, easterly breeze.

  When I got there, he was putting the finishing touches on the vegetable by adjusting it in the lawn chair just so and placing a thick piece of rubber behind it. Beside him on the ground lay a Sioux rifle scabbard, which was completely beaded with eagle feathers leading from the edge all the way to the butt. If the Game and Fish knew Omar had real eagle feathers, they’d come take them away and slap Omar with a $250 fine. I figured Omar probably lost that much in the daily wash. It was brain-tanned leather, as soft as a horse’s nose, and the color of butter melting in the sun. The minute glass trading beads were Maundy yellow, a faded mustard tint I recognized as over a hundred years old. He picked up the scabbard, and we started back for the house.

  “How far have we gone?” He was wearing a black, ripstop down jacket and now favored Ted Nugent over Custer.

  “I have no idea.”

  “Use the range finder.”

  I aimed the little scope gadget he had given me at the pumpkin that was sitting in the aged lawn chair. The distance did nothing to diminish the ludicrous image, especially with the little green indicator numbers jumping back and forth in the lower-right-hand corner. I lowered the scope and looked at him. “You tell me, Great White Hunter.”

  He looked back across the slight grade at the squash luxuriating at the base of the hillside. “Three hundred and one yards.”

  I smiled. “Close. Three hundred.”

  “Step back here where I am.” He continued walking as I stood in his spot and looked back. The range finder read 301, and the small hairs on the back of my neck stirred. He stopped and looked back at me and then unbuttoned three Indian-head nickels from the scabbard and slowly slid the rifle from its protective covering. The sheath looked like the skin of a snake coming off and what glistened in the early morning sun looked twice as deadly as any rattler I had ever seen.

  The eighth-century pacifist Li Ch’uan branded the use of gunpowder weapons as tools of ill omen. “Eighteen-seventy-four?”

  “Yep.”

  “.45-70?”

  “Yep.” He handed me the rifle and crossed his arms. “You ever seen one up close?”

  “Not a real one.”

  It was heavy, and it seemed to me that if you missed what you were shooting at, you could simply run it down and beat it to death, whatever it was. The barrel was just shy of three feet long. I gently lowered the lever and dropped the block, looking through thirty-two inches of six groove, one in eighteen-inch, right-hand twist. From this vantage point, the world looked very small indeed. The action was smooth and precise, and I marveled at the workmanship that was more than 125 years old. The design on the aged monster was a falling block, breech-loading single shot. The old-timers used to take a great deal of pride in the fact that a single shot was all it took. The trigger was a double set, and the sights were an aperture rear with a globe-style front. I pulled the weapon from my shoulder and read the top of the barrel: Business Special.

  What kind of special business had Christian Sharps intended? In 1874 the rifle had been adopted by the military because it could kill a horse dead as a stone at six hundred yards—six football fields. Congregational minister Henry Ward Beecher pledged his Plymouth church to furnish twenty-five Sharps rifles for use in bloody Kansas. Redoubtably, the preacher may have done more for the cause of abolitionism with his Beecher’s bibles than did his sister Harriet with her Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But it was John Brown who brought the Sharps to a bloody birth at Harpers Ferry, and a nation’s innocence was lost at Gettysburg. After the Civil War, free ammunition had been handed out to privateer hunters to usher the vast, uncontrollable buffalo herds into extinction. Then there were the Indians. Good and bad, these actions had earned the Sharps buffalo rifle the title of one of the most significant weapons in history and in language. Sharps shooter: sharp-shooter. “What makes you think . . . ?”

  “The amount of lead, cartridge lubricant, no powder burns . . . A feeling.” He turned and walked toward the house, the rifle scabbard thrown over his shoulder. After a moment, he stopped. “Three hundred and seventy.” Big deal.

  I was sitting at the picnic table and contemplated muzzle velocity and trajectory sightings at 440 yards. The Sharps was now wedged between three small sand bags, and a much larger spotting scope sat atop a three-pronged pedestal at my elbow. Omar returned with two cups of coffee, at my request. The cups were thick buffalo china with his brand on them, and it was really good coffee.

  “Jay still enjoying the matinee?”

  “You know, I’ve seen men ruined by drink, drugs, and Dodge pickup trucks, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen one ruined by soft-core porn.” He nudged his mug a little farther over and leaned his elbows on the table. “You’d think he’d never seen a set of tits before.”

  “Amazing what they can do with special effects these days.” I looked down the three-foot barrel. “Trajectory?”

  “Like a rainbow, and it hits like a twelve-pound sledgehammer at fourteen hundred feet per second.”

  “Sounds slow and painful.”

  The noise he made was not kind. “Like my marriage.”

  I looked across the range and unbuttoned the top button of my uniform coat. The sun was getting higher, and the warmth felt good on my back. “You think this is what did it, huh?”

  “Reasonably sure.”

  “We need to broaden our search grid.”

  “By a wide margin.” He pushed the mug even farther away; maybe he didn’t drink coffee. “If you want, I’ll go up there and do a walk around. Might be less intrusive than Search and Rescue.”

  I wondered why he was being so helpful. “You curious about this case?”

  “A little.”

  “I’d have to send somebody with you.”

  He laughed. “Does this mean I’ve made the list?”

  “Don’t feel so honored, everybody with two ears and a trigger finger has made it so far.”

  “Maybe I can help you to shorten it.” He looked out at the doomed pumpkin. “Well
. . .”

  “Well, what?”

  He nudged the butt of the rifle toward me with his fingertips. “I’ve shot it before. Your turn.”

  By the time I got back to the paved county road we were in a full-blown Chinook, and the temperature had risen above sixty-five degrees. I regretted not taking off my jacket before I’d gotten in the Bullet and flipped the heater over to vent. The Esper place was out near the junkyard south of town, so I hopped on the interstate and blew by Durant. I was about a mile past the exit when I remembered that I had told Ruby to send Jim. I figured I’d just keep going and radioed in to tell Ruby to tell Ferg I’d just take care of it myself.

  “I left a message at his place and on his cell. It’s before noon, so he’s probably out fishing.” Static. “When are you going to get a mobile phone?”

  “Then we wouldn’t be able to say cool things like ‘roger that.’ ”

  More static. “I’m willing to make the sacrifice.” Static. “You better get back here and let the Ferg go round up the Espers, Vic says she’s got news from DCI.”

  I was already looking for a turnaround and spotted one at the top of the next rise. “Nothing she wants to tell me over the radio?”

  Silence for a moment. “She says she’d tell you over a mobile phone.”

  “I’ll be there in a few minutes.” I whipped through the official vehicle crossover, checked my speed, and automatically looked around for the HPs; they love to give tickets to sheriffs.

  I parked the Bullet and reached over onto the passenger seat to get the small satchel Omar had given me. Vic was seated across from Ruby in one of our plastic civilian chairs with her feet propped up on Ruby’s desk. Her legs were barely long enough to make the reach. It didn’t look comfortable, but it was Vic.

  Big smile. “How you doin’, faddass?”

  “I’m sorrowed to see the time spent in the echoing halls of criminal investigation have done nothing to curb your native vulgarity.”

  They looked at each other, and Vic raised her eyebrow. “He are a college graduate.”