Cold Dish

by Craig Johnson

  On a whim, I punched up Vonnie’s number and listened to her machine tell me she was unavailable at this time but to leave a message and she’d get back to me as soon as possible. When I hung up the phone, Ruby was at the door; it appeared I was on the road to being forgiven. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Mrs. Keller says Jim’s gone hunting with a friend in Nebraska. She also says that she’s bringing Bryan his lunch and a few things and wants to know how long we are intending on keeping him.”

  “Oh, brother . . .” I placed my elbows on the desk and rested my chin on my combined fist.

  “You’re going to wish you hadn’t stuck your hand in that hornet’s nest.”

  I looked at the blinking red lights on my phone. “Do you think she was lying?”

  She crossed her arms and covered her mouth, deep in thought. “It makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “Yep, it does.” She glanced down the hall toward the jail in an unconscious effort to conceal her thoughts. “When Henry gets here, tell him to go down to Dave’s and get some real winter gear, altitude stuff, and some Winchester .308s.” She nodded absentmindedly and disappeared back toward her desk. “Is this Omar on line one?”

  She called back down the hallway, “Line one,” then reappeared in the doorway. “By the way, Artie Small Song is in the Yellowstone County Jail and has been there since Saturday. They want to know if you want him; they say he eats like a horse.”

  “Tell them it’s a wonderful offer, but no thanks.” She nodded and disappeared as I picked up the receiver and punched line one. “Omar?”

  “Yes.” It wasn’t a happy yes.

  I thought for a moment. “Are you aware of the term posse comitatus?”

  “Yes.”

  I listened to the silence on the line and then settled into the plan. “Do you still have that Neiman Marcus helicopter?”

  11

  “I do not think the last one of these I was in was like this.”

  I looked around at the embossed, luxurious, Italian leather interior, but once again my attention was drawn to the swirling countryside as we ascended the east slope at over 160 miles an hour, a fact of which my stomach was acutely aware. “Don’t talk to me, I’m concentrating on not throwing up.”

  “I did not know that they come with doors, and the little bud vases are a nice touch.”

  “I’m going to make a point of puking on you first and into them second.”

  Henry smiled and looked out the other window while balancing the Weatherby Mark V lightly between his powerful hands, completely oblivious to the speed and altitude. He had raided the small area of army surplus in Dave’s sale department near the back door of the sporting goods store and was wearing fingerless wool gloves; one of the old, reflective-green, M1-style jackets with the genuine acrylic fur lining; a pair of Carhartt overalls; and a new pair of Sorels. He looked like a disco Eskimo. “Did Omar really buy this helicopter at Neiman Marcus?”

  I sighed and attempted to put a good seat on my internal organs. “It was in the divorce settlement with Myra.”

  “So, she bought the helicopter at Neiman Marcus?”

  I belched and placed a hand over my stomach. “He bought it for her when they were getting along. When they got divorced, he took it back.” He was silent for a few moments, but I knew it was too good to last.

  “Where exactly is the helicopter department in Neiman Marcus?”

  I dipped my head and rested it against the barrel of the Remington pump I carried. “Please shut up.”

  He considered the rifle between his knees. “Did the Weatherby come from Nordstrom’s?”

  The metal felt cool against my forehead as I listened to the whine of the superchargers on the big Bell engine as it fought to carry us through the thermals the cragged peaks below were creating. I thought about my plan. I had to keep reminding myself that nobody else had thought up this harebrained stuff and that I was responsible for my own misery, but we couldn’t have covered this amount of ground on foot. If we saw anything, if we saw George Esper, we would go down and snatch him up, dead or alive, and get out of there like a Neidless Markup bat out of hell. Just the thought of up and down made my stomach flip again.

  He must have noticed me closing my eyes. “You want me to tell you about my first time?”

  “Don’t tell me it’s Dena Many Camps.”

  He smiled, playing with the adjustments on the rifle’s scope and then readjusting them back. “I remember the first time I rode in one of these things. We were doing a hot extraction out of Laos in ’68 with this NVA colonel we were taking down to the magic fishing village on the coast. We had lost about half our patrol and were flying really low, under radar, maybe a hundred feet off the water. He was pretty sure we were going to throw him out, so sure that he decided to take things into his own hands. He must have tried to hurl himself out of that helicopter half a dozen times. On the sixth attempt, he kicked me in the chin. So, I just folded my arms and figured the next time he goes for the door, this fella better learn how to fly.”

  I opened my eyes and looked up at him. “And?”

  He continued looking out the window. “He did not.”

  “What?”

  “Fly.”

  I thought about it. “Is that story supposed to make me feel better?”

  I looked up at the back of Omar’s head. He wasn’t happy about the current situation either. We were just cresting the meadows at the head of the valley, and the treetops swayed as the big rotors batted them away. I looked past the trees to the sky and made a few more calculations on the weather. I picked up the headset from the console beside me, held one of the cups to my ear, and adjusted the microphone. “Omar?”

  He turned a little in his seat, and I could see him speaking. “Yes?”

  “I figure about two hours before it hits?”

  He studied the horizon ahead. “Maybe three, you never know.”

  “Let’s make it two; I want to know.”

  He nodded his head, and my stomach did a half gainer with a full twist. I thought about all the light aircraft crashes I had investigated in my tenure as sheriff; it seemed like there was one every couple of years. Good pilots, good aircraft, but the mountain weather was always unpredictable. Between the thermals, downdrafts, and quirky winds, I wasn’t sure how anybody kept the things aloft except with a liberal application of positive thought. “Doesn’t this stuff bother you? Just a little bit?”

  He looked at me, slightly swaying back and forth with the movements of the helicopter. “No, it does not.” He watched me for a while longer.

  “What does bother you?”

  “You, thinking I might be capable of murder.”

  I looked at him, with the shotgun’s barrel between my eyes, and tried to figure if this was really something he wanted to talk about or if it was just another distraction. In the end, I decided that it didn’t matter. “You are capable of doing it.”

  He nodded. “Physically, technically, I suppose so.” He leaned forward a little. “But do you think I would?”

  “Do you think you’d be here if I did?”

  He considered this. “There is the old saying ‘Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.’ ”

  “You think you’re an enemy?”

  “I am trying to find out if you think I am.” He leaned back in the cream-colored leather and looked up at the monitors on the ceiling. “Sourdough Creek.”

  We were more than halfway there. “Try to look at it from my point of view.”

  He closed his eyes. Henry could surrender himself to a hypothetical, even if it included making himself the suspect in an ongoing murder investigation. He never worked on a single level. “MMO?”

  “Motive.”

  “One through three?”

  We had played this game numerous times, but never with Henry as the perpetrator. “One?”

  He was talking fast with his eyes still closed. “It cannot be conclusively shown that I have ever met Cody Pritchard or Jac
ob Esper or had reason to have feelings of ill will toward either of them.”

  Impossible. “Two.”

  “Not only have I met Cody Pritchard and Jacob Esper, but there are hard feelings between us since they took my niece into a basement and raped her repeatedly with their tiny, little, circumcised dicks, with bottles, and with baseball bats.”

  A chill was starting at the base of my spine. “Three.”

  “I was seen stalking through the courthouse after the trial with a Sharps .45-70 under my arm and muttering something about Cody Pritchard and Jacob Esper canceling their subscriptions to Indian Country Today.” He opened his eyes. “I give motive a two.”

  “Two and a half.”

  He genuinely looked hurt. “Why?”

  “Al Monroe’s description of the perp, large with long, darkish hair.”

  He sighed and pulled the Weatherby back against his chest and folded his arms around it. “All right, two and a half, but I’m not going to be as easy on the next two.”

  “Means?”

  He thought. “One: I have been stricken by a strange, tropical disease, which has paralyzed both of my trigger fingers.”

  “Uh, huh. Two.”

  “Both of these boys have been killed by a caliber of weapon of which I am in possession.”

  “Three.”

  “Ballistics matches this weapon with the slugs that killed both of these boys.” He shrugged and looked out the window. “Two.”

  “Means, two.” I studied the lines on his face, and it seemed as if some of the joy had receded from the game. “Opportunity?”

  “One: I was in Vatican City with the pope at the time.”

  “Two.”

  “I was seen in the area of both murders, but no one can place me at the scene of either.”

  “Three.”

  “I am found standing over both bodies with aforementioned .45-70 in my hands as both Cody and Jacob respectively gasp out their dying breaths.” He looked back at me. “Opportunity knocks twice?”

  I shook my head. “One and a half. You had the argument with Cody at the bar, not too distant from the Hudson Bridge, but nobody saw you on the mountain.”

  “Al Monroe’s description?”

  “Not a positive identification; anyway, we already used it on motive.”

  “What about the feathers?”

  “Circumstantial; fake feathers indicate a fake Indian to me.”

  He smiled. “I was late running yesterday.” I stared at him for a moment. “No sense playing the game if you can’t play it honestly. A two.”

  We sat there looking at each other. The theory was that three out of nine meant you should be looking for another suspect, and nine out of nine meant you started having the suspect’s mail forwarded to Rawlins. Prosecutors usually liked higher than a six before going to trial, so Henry’s six barely let him off the hook. “Looks like you’re innocent, of the murders at least.” I paused. “Honestly, who do you think is doing it?”

  “Honestly?” He sniffed and dropped his chin on his chest. “I think it is somebody we do not know. I think it is somebody we have not thought of.”

  “A sleeper?”

  “Yes. Somebody that is doing this for very strong reasons, something we do not yet understand.”

  I nodded. “Do you know Jim Keller very well?”

  He looked up, very slowly. “No.”

  “Which of the four boys do you consider the most innocent, and whose life’s been messed up by this the most for the least cause?”

  “Bryan.” His eyes stayed steady. “The clever thing gets in the way in your line of work, does it not?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Is Jim Keller a shooter?”

  “He’s supposedly in Nebraska hunting with some friends.”

  I watched him turn the wheels. “Would you run off and leave your son here with all these things going on?”

  “He never came to the trial.”

  The eyes didn’t move. “Neither did I.”

  “She wasn’t on trial.”

  “The hell she was not.”

  I didn’t feel like pursuing that line of answering. “I guess we are back to you. Know your rights?”

  “Yes, but it is the wrongs that keep getting me into trouble, Officer.”

  We watched the trees swing below as Omar and the department-store helicopter used a variation on the IFR, or I Follow Road, method of navigation to get us to Lost Twin. I thought for a moment and became aware that my stomach had settled. West Tensleep Lake lay at the base of the high valley that continued up the ridge until you got to Cloud Peak, the crowning jewel of the Bighorns. The Indians had named it Cloud Peak because, like most accentuated landmasses, it developed its own weather patterns. It hid from the plains below most of the time, peeking out at us from behind a haze of high-altitude cumulus.

  Omar was rounding off the edges to get the most out of his three-hundred-mile travel range. We had been up for the better part of an hour and, through the front glass of the passenger side of the cockpit, I could make out a few cabins that had been built before the government had acquisitioned the land. We were now technically in Big Horn County, but the less said about that the better. By the time we followed Middle Tensleep Creek below Mather Peak we would be back in Absaroka County and my proper jurisdiction. You could feel the lift and roll as the chopper followed the creek toward Mirror Lake and continued up the small valley to our final destination, the Lost Twin. They were both sizable. I noticed Omar’s hand waving in the cockpit. I picked up the headset and adjusted the microphone. “Yep?”

  “You’ve got a call on the single band; I’ll patch it through.”

  A moment of static, and Ruby’s voice was there in my ear. “Walt, the Game and Fish called. They said there wasn’t anyone signed in at the trailhead to go to Lost Twin, but they said they’ve got a black Mazda Navajo with the plates Tuff-1 at the Tensleep parking lot.”

  “That part’s good news. Anything else?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Affirmative? Hey, you really are getting the hang of this.”

  “Walt, I was going back over the duty roster so that I could write the Roundup for the week. There was a complaint phoned in yesterday morning that sounds suspicious.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Tracy Roberts, Kent’s sister called; they’ve got that place down on Mesa road, on 115? Well, she and her dad were out feeding cows yesterday morning when the old man saw a porcupine that’d been doing some damage, so he makes her stop so he can shoot it.”

  “On the county road?”

  “I know, she wasn’t sure if she should call in, but she was angry. She says that somebody came roaring down the road and almost hit the old man.” I waited. “She said it was a green pickup, an old one.” I looked over at Henry, who continued to look out the window at the rushing scenery.

  “What time?”

  “A little after dawn.” I continued to look at my friend who had just moved above a six. “Walt, do you copy that?”

  “Yep, they get a look at the driver?”

  “No.”

  Radio silence for a few moments. “Roger that. Over and out.”

  I pulled the headphone and rested it on my lap and studied him. After a moment he turned. “Something?”

  I nodded slowly. “Yep.” I explained about the black Mazda and the lack of sign-in sheet but neglected to mention the sighting of a green truck very much like his.

  He smiled. “Lost Twin, how could it be anything else?”

  We continued on as I tried to harness the thoughts that made the helicopter seem as if it were standing still. I looked out the side window and watched. I felt the blood in my body shift forward as Omar slowed the helicopter from 160 to nothing and poised over the small ridge that separated the two lakes. I could easily make out the pattern the rotors made on the surface of the water, spiraling dimples that rotated outward to feathering waves that agitated the surrounding shores. Without my asking,
Omar began a slow, clockwise rotation to give us the maximum view. Henry went to the door on the other side as I hunched against the Plexiglas window and searched the area for any signs of human activity below.

  The lakes are situated at the bottom of the Mather Peak Ridge that touches just over twelve thousand feet. Only through the valley in which we had made our approach could you make any kind of retreat and that was due northwest, the exact direction from which the storm was approaching. So far there were no real signs of the front, and I was beginning to think that the skin-of-our-teeth thing wasn’t going to be an issue when my attention was drawn to the higher peaks to the west. It was still coming; it had just paused for a moment to gather its breath to make the run up the west slope of the Bighorns. The surrounding area was going to be swept into a frozen maelstrom a little before dark. I had every intention of being out of there by then but, just in case, there were two six-thousand-cubic-inch packs lying on the floor between Henry and me. They had extra clothes, food, a tent, two sleeping bags, and enough emergency supplies to keep us going for a little less than a week. Every time I looked at the oncoming clouds, I nudged my boot up against the packs and felt better.

  “Hey.” It figured Henry would spot something first. I turned and looked into the cockpit; Omar had seen something too and pointed to an area in a small gully hidden among the trees directly beside the farthest lake. His arm was decorated with three turquoise bracelets. Style. The nose of the helicopter dipped as we accelerated to the area and hovered just above the treetops. There was a small, green tent there, a little two-person job, with a rain fly staked to the ground. It was holding its own against the pounding of the Bell.

  I reached up and tapped Omar on the shoulder. He nudged one of the ear cups forward and inclined his head toward me. “This thing got a PA?” He nodded and flipped the appropriate switches on the overhead console and motioned for me to pick up my headset and use the microphone. The helicopter had little bud vases, how could it not have an announcing system? I cleared my throat and listened to it echo from the surrounding mountainsides. I glanced up, as both Omar and Henry looked at me. “Shit.” This too echoed across the peaks.