I’m not sure what I had hoped to accomplish with this particular outburst. I was just being honest and, to my utter surprise, she placed her hand under my chin, leaned over the door on tiptoes, and kissed me on the mouth, slowly and gently. As our faces parted, and my eyes were once again able to open and focus, she whispered, “You should call me, very soon.” As the little red Jeep skimmed away, I felt the thought of a mobile phone growing on me.
On the way back to the office, I picked up three chicken dinners from the Bee and fended off Dorothy’s questions about what had just taken place on Main Street across from her restaurant. She reminded me that hers was a family establishment and that such overt demonstrations of lust might be better served in a more private setting, by getting a room.
Ruby took one Styrofoam container and one iced tea out of my hands. “You keep this up and I might vote for you myself.”
I continued on my way to the door of Vic’s office. She was sitting with her feet up on her own desk for a change; folders and clipboards with legal pads ran the distance from her hips to her ankles. She was writing on one of the tablets with the phone cradled between her chin and shoulder. I carefully placed her tea and lunch on the desk. She nodded thanks, and I sat down to open mine. It was when I realized I hadn’t gotten any napkins that Ruby appeared in the doorway and handed me a roll of paper towels from the kitchenette in back: fine dining at its best. The steam rolled out as I opened the container and prepared to eat Dorothy’s famous Brookville, Kansas, recipe chicken. It was a religious experience.
Vic nodded and grunted a few agreements before she hung up. “This is a really fun job you’ve got me doing here.” She looked at me again. “Do you have lipstick on your face?”
I wiped it off with a paper towel and picked up a thigh. “Don’t be silly, what’ve you got?”
She looked at me for a moment longer, then continued. “Guess where the majority of these replicas are made?”
I momentarily paused on the batter-covered thigh. “New Jersey.”
She began placing the folders, clipboards, and paraphernalia on the desk. She fanned the information she’d gathered across the surface and placed her chicken container on her lap, taking the lid off and sipping her iced tea. She never used a straw. “Italy. The damn things are made in northern Italy by some firm called Pedersoli.”
“Sounds dirty.” That got a look. I continued to eat.
She picked up a breast. “What?”
“Only thing I know about Italian war rifles is you can buy ’em cheap, never fired, only dropped once.” She cocked an eyebrow and bit into her own chicken. “Sorry, old World War II joke.” She stuck a hand out, and I tore off a paper towel. “It’s chess night with Lucian; got me thinking about it.” I nodded toward the desk. “What’ve you got, other than a nation of origin?”
She got that predatory look on her face, unimpeded by the way she was dismembering the poor chicken. “There are a few made in this country, the most famous being the Shiloh Sharps made up in Big Timber.”
“New Jersey?”
“Montana.” Her eyes flattened. “Are you going to behave so we can get through this in a reasonable amount of time?”
“What happened to your good mood?”
She wiped her fingers off on her pants and picked up one of the clipboards. “My boss gave me this shitty job to do.” She took another sip of her tea. “The Shiloh version is the top of the line, with a waiting list of about four years. The only one sold in our area as far back as registration goes is one to a Roger Russell, about two years ago.” I stopped chewing. “Bingo?”
“He’s on Omar’s short list, and he was in the bar the night you called.”
“Really? Who else is on the list?”
“I think me, but I’m not sure.”
She looked back at the clipboard. “Well, your name didn’t come up.”
“And Roger Russell?”
“Special ordered his from the Sportshop here in town, .45-70 caliber. Mean anything?”
“I’ll go talk to David Fielding; I was going to anyway.” Dave would be a better source of information concerning a particular caliber in the area than the FBI and ATF combined.
“Then Roger Russell?”
“Among others.”
She turned the plastic spork in her mouth, pulling it out to speak. “Sounds like Omar’s list is bothering you.”
I took a deep breath and was amazed at how quickly the weight of my chest forced the air out. “A little.”
“Who else is on it?” I told her as she worked on another piece of chicken. “Considering our earlier conversation, the Indian suspects worry me the most.” I agreed. “You’re going to have to get a federal search warrant to go out there.”
“You know, Balzac once described bureaucracy as a giant mechanism operated by pygmies.”
“What’d your buddy Balzac have to say about inadmissible evidence?”
“Not a lot. I think he considered the subject beneath him.” She shook her head as I continued to smile at her. “What else you got?”
“We’ve got a few registered bona fides.”
“Antiques and curio weapons?”
“Do you believe Omar has his registered?”
“That would be the insurance thing we talked about.”
“Mike Rubin was one.”
“Well that’s two on our list.” I put my chicken down and wiped my hands. “It’s really going to piss me off if Omar turns out to be right.”
“At least you don’t have to go on a fucking picnic with the prick this afternoon. What time am I supposed to be out there?”
I looked at my pocket watch. “Three.”
I didn’t catch the look, because by the time I got back to her she had returned to the clipboard; the coleslaw spork jutted from the corner of her mouth like a fishing lure. “You really did miss me.”
It was true. I had.
I parked the Bullet in front of the Sportshop. I was damned if I was going to be caught walking on Main Street again, it was too emotionally dangerous. I passed the fishing department, went through the acres of fleece wear, and stopped in front of the center counter. There was a skinny, redheaded kid reading the Courant, and it took a while for him to notice me. I was the only other person in the place. “Can I help you?”
“Dave around?”
“He’s in the back.” I waited. “Do you want me to go get him?”
“If you would.” He looked uncertain. “Don’t worry, I won’t steal anything.” He rounded the corner and hightailed it for the stock room.
I looked over at the gun rack along the right-hand wall and thought about the statement that guns made this country what it is today and wondered if that was good or bad. We were a combative breed. I was not hard on us, though; I didn’t need to be, history was. Ten major wars and countless skirmishes over the last two hundred years pretty much told the tale. But that was political history, not personal. I was brought up on a ranch but, because of my father, the romance of guns had somehow escaped me. In his eyes, a gun was a tool, not some half-assed deity. Guys who named their guns worried him and me.
I walked down the aisle and looked at the shining walnut stocks, the glistening blue barrels. There were beautiful hand-engraved, over-and-under fowling pieces next to ugly Armalite AR-15s that looked and felt like a Mattel toy. Small chains wound their way through the trigger guards with little bronze locks at the end of each row. It was like a chain gang for weapons. Some of them might be good, some of them might be bad, but there was no way to tell until somebody picked them up. By the time I got back to the front of the aisle, Dave was waiting for me.
Dave had a studious quality framed in the metal-edged glasses, which emphasized his pale eyes. He looked like a basketball-playing owl in an unbuttoned shirt. He was originally from Missouri and had a matter-of-fact quality to his speech that I had always found entertaining. He also knew how to keep his mouth shut. “You’re looking for a gun?”
“Naw, I g
ot plenty.” I looked past him to the kid, who was hovering at the counter.
“Matt, why don’t you go help them unload the truck, okay?” He disappeared. “Something important?”
“Maybe.” I explained the situation without giving out any names, motives, or qualified information.
“Sharps?”
“Or anything pertaining to . . . ?”
He held his chin in his hand and looked down the row of rifles and shotguns. “We’ve got a few of the replicas.”
“Italian?”
“Yeah.”
“Pedersoli?” I was showing off.
He released his chin and pushed the glasses farther up on his nose. “As a matter of fact, they are.” We walked down the aisle, and he unlocked the end chain. I expected them all to make a run for it. “These are early Pedersolis, not long after they bought out Garrett.” I nodded sagely. “I don’t believe they changed the production line much.” I nodded sagely some more. It was fun being an expert on Italian buffalo rifles, having a specialty. He handed the rifle to me. It was similar to Omar’s in size and weight, but that was where the similarities ended. The metal on this one had an antiqued, cloudy-blue appearance, and the wood stock seemed hard and plastic. Comparing it to the museum piece I had fired this morning was inevitable but not fair.
I set the hammer to the safety/loading notch before opening the action just as if there were a fired case in the chamber, preventing any unnecessary stress on the firing pin. Amazing the things you learned hanging around with Omar. It was smooth but nothing like the one from this morning.
“What’s the accuracy on these things?”
“Actually, pretty good.”
I placed the narrow butt plate against the deep bruise on my shoulder. It fit my wound perfectly. I raised the barrel toward Main Street and envisioned Italian buffalo sitting at a street-side café, drinking Chianti. “Five hundred yards?”
“Oh, God no.”
I let the buffalo go. “Won’t get there?”
“It’ll get there but not with much accuracy. Not with these repros.”
I handed the rifle back to him. “Sell many of ’em?”
“A few; here and there.”
“Mind telling me who bought them?”
He slowly exhaled, blowing out his lips. “I could go off the top of my head, but I can get it out of the computer and you’d have an exact list.”
“Great.” He locked the guns back, and I followed him to the counter and the computer. “You ever sell any of the real ones?”
“No.”
“How much is one worth, a really good .45-70?”
The exhale again. “As much as a vacation in Tuscany.”
“How about ammunition . . . do you sell much for these?”
“Who knows?”
“Can you get that for me?”
“It’ll take longer.”
I was asking a lot, and I knew it. “It would be a great help.”
“Can I get it to you tomorrow?” He reached over and turned on the printer.
“That’d be fine.” He watched the paper roll through the printer for a moment, and then tore loose the list and handed it to me without looking at it. “You don’t want to see?” I asked him.
“None of my business.”
I folded the sheet in half and stuck out my hand. “Thank you, Dave.”
Ruby had said there was a cold front on the way and, by tomorrow morning, there was supposed to be more than four inches of the white stuff. I tossed my jacket onto the passenger seat. If the warm weather wasn’t going to last long, I was going to enjoy it while it was here. I fired her up, rolling down the window and resting my arm on the door. It felt good to have the extra elbow room.
You couldn’t blame the computer; it probably did the list of three names in alphabetical order. The first name on the list was Brian Connally—Turk.
6
In 1939, Lucian Connally had been told by his mother to sweep the front porch of their dry and dusty ranch house. He had refused and, when asked what it was that he intended to do, he had replied, “Go to China.” Which he did.
Lucian didn’t like family.
After finishing Army Air Corps flight school in California, he immediately joined the American Volunteer Group, a collection of a hundred U.S. military pilots released from enlistment so that they might serve as mercenaries in the lend-lease born, fledgling Chinese Nationalist Air Force. Lucian’s political zeal was reinforced by the $750 a month salary and by the $500 a head bonus promised by the Chinese for every Japanese plane shot down. Lucian found he had a knack for such activities and, by the time he left China on August 6, 1941, he had accumulated quite a little nest egg. A little over a year later he returned to the Pacific on the aircraft carrier Hornet and, in a cumbersome B-25, bombed Tokyo, crashed into the Yellow Sea, and was captured by the Japanese and sentenced to life imprisonment.
Lucian didn’t like Japs.
There was a sun-yellowed, decomposing circular in an intricate gold frame on the wall of private suite number 32 at the Durant Home of Assisted Living. Below the grainy photograph of five men in flight jackets and the exotic print was the translation, “The cruel, inhuman, and beastlike American pilots who, in a bold intrusion of the holy territory of the Empire on April 18, 1942, dropped incendiaries and bombs on nonmilitary hospitals, schools, and private houses, and even dive-strafed playing school children, were captured, courtmartialed, and severely punished according to military law.” Two of the men had been ushered outside immediately following the mock trial and summarily executed; the remaining three survived forty months of torture and starvation. Lucian was the short one in the middle with the cocky look on his face, who was smiling like hell.
After the war, Lucian had drifted back to Wyoming and then back to Absaroka County. He then drifted into being sheriff on the strength of his being the toughest piece of gristle in four states. This had been tested when Lucian had had his right leg almost blown off by Basque bootleggers back in the midfifties.
Lucian didn’t like Basquos.
He had tied the strap from an 03 Springfield he carried in the backseat of his Nash Ambassador around the exploded leg and drove himself back to Durant from Jim Creek Hill, thirty-two miles. They took the leg.
Lucian didn’t like sawbones.
They say the subzero temperatures that night saved his life, but I knew better. His more than a quarter century of sheriffing had been nothing short of epic, and his reputation in the Equality State was ferocious. Simply stated, he was the most highly decorated, retired law enforcement official in the country. “How’s them big titties on that Eye-talian deputy of yours?”
He was also a colossal pervert.
I kept my finger on the bishop and looked up at him. “Lucian . . .”
“Just askin’.” It was one of his favorite tactics, shocking me out of any sense of concentration. This might be why I had not won a chess game since the spring of 1998. I slid the bishop against the border as he looked at me through his bushy eyebrows. “What’s goin’ on?”
I settled back in the horsehide wing chair and took in the site of the losing battle. Lucian had been allowed to bring his own furnishings to the “old folks home” as he called it, and the jarring effect of the genuine western antiques in the sterile environment was unsettling. I had been coming here and playing chess with Lucian since he had moved in eight years ago. I never missed a Tuesday for fear that Lucian might lose some of his faculties and, in the eight years, he had not lost one iota. I, on the other hand, was sinking fast. “Nothing, why do you ask?”
He moved. “You ain’t said shit since you got here.”
I looked at the board. “I’m trying to concentrate.”
“Ain’t gonna do you no good, I’m jus’ gonna spank yer ass again, anyway.” He dug a finger in his ear, examined the wax on his pinkie, and wiped it on the faded blue-jean flap at the end of his stump. “I can’t believe you didn’t bring any beer.”
I
couldn’t believe it either. For almost a decade I had been sneaking beer and Bryer’s blackberry brandy in to Lucian on Tuesday nights. “I need to talk to you about some stuff.”
“I figured as much, I’m just waitin’ for you to start.” He moved. “Important stuff ?”
“Sheriff stuff.”
“Oh, that shit.” He watched me move a knight out to the slaughter and slowly shook his head. “Well, let’s talk it out and get it over with so I can get at least one decent game tonight.”
“It’s about your great-nephew.”
He looked up. “What’d he do now?”
“Beat on Jules Belden.”
His hands stayed still. “How bad?”
“Bad enough.”
He leaned back in his own chair, readjusting his weight and looking at his reflection in the dark surface of the sliding glass door behind me. He was a handsome old booger, movie starish like the judge, but in a more rugged way. The spiderweb wrinkles spread out from the corners of his eyes to his unreceding hairline and the trim landing strip of platinum white hair. He lacked the aesthetic of the judge; everything on him was square, even his flattop haircut, which I’m sure hadn’t changed since Roosevelt had been in office. His eyes were the darkest brown I had ever seen, the black of the pupils seemed to blend into the mahogany surrounding them. I’m sure they were swallowing the darkness outside and in. Lucian didn’t have any children of his own, and the responsibility of carrying the line into perpetuity rested solely with Turk. He was not completely satisfied with this turn of events, and the set of his jaw made that fact clear. “You wanna drink?”
“In case you’ve forgotten, after reminding me all these times, I didn’t bring anything.”
He scratched the slight stubble on his jaw with fingernails that had been cut down to the cuticles. “Well, thank Christ I don’t depend on you for much.” He pointed to the corner cupboard. “There’s a bottle of bourbon behind the star quilt on the bottom shelf.”
Cold Dish Page 13