And the second incident in a month at the Dunwoodie place.
The first had come Halloween weekend. Sally often parked her Mustang in the garage, but on that particularly risky night, for some reason, she’d stupidly left it in the driveway. The next morning, all the windows were broken and a swastika had been spray-painted on the hood. She’d been pissed as hell of course, and ranted and raved and all that. But ultimately, she’d chalked it up to Halloween pranksters (that’s what ten years in LA would do for you) and called the insurance company. Had said that after she got it fixed, she’d go on down to John Elway Toyota (the Broncos were 11–2, heading for immortality once again) and get herself a Land Cruiser and garage the Mustang.
When they had an informal Wrangler’s Club meeting on the following Monday morning, Dickie had explained that Laramie was the kind of town where you could easily find out who was likely to be into swastikas, and he thought he might look into it. Delice had added that she could think of a couple of possible suspects. Sally assured him that she didn’t feel like hassling the matter (more blasé LA-type ennui) and insisted that her insurance was covering the damages. Delice had given Dickie a “let’s talk later” look and told Sally where to get her windows fixed and who did a good paint job. It occurred to both Dickie and Delice to ask Josh and Jerry Jeff whether they might know about any notorious Halloween mischief.
A couple of days later, Dickie had run into Hawk at the Diamond Shamrock. He happened to mention the incident, and Hawk said he’d see that Sally used her garage. Then Hawk had looked thoughtful for a moment, and finally he’d said, “Actually, Dickie, I took her car down to Mike the mechanic to get the carburetor and the brakes adjusted a couple months ago. When I went to pick it up, Mike told me it was a good thing the brakes were pulling, because otherwise he’d never have found out that a brake line in the right rear wheel was about to snap. Said it looked like it had been filed.”
“You might have mentioned that to me, Hawk,” said Dickie.
“I would have, if I’d believed it. But at the time, I didn’t even tell Sally. I didn’t have any reason to think anybody would do such a thing. Now, I guess I do.”
“Anything else you haven’t said?” Dickie asked him.
“Not that I can think of. If anything occurs to me, I’ll give you a call,” Hawk said gravely. “There’s no reason to worry Sally about this, is there?”
Dickie chuckled. “The less we worry her, the easier it will be for all of us.”
That afternoon, the second thing had happened. The Dunwoodie house was empty. Sally and Hawk had taken off that morning, Friday, in Hawk’s truck, hoping to beat the storm and get a long way toward Tucson to visit Hawk’s folks for Thanksgiving. About two o’clock, Maude Stark had come by to get the mail and check on things. As Maude told the story, she’d come in the front door, heard noises in the basement, and gone immediately back out to her truck to get the deer rifle she kept in her gun rack.
She’d opened the front door as quietly as she could and tiptoed to the basement stairs. She could hear the sound of her own breathing. It seemed to her she could hear somebody else breathing, too.
“Beggin’ your pardon, but what in God’s name did you think you were doing, Miss Stark?” Dickie had asked her.
“I thought I was going down into the basement to shoot a prowler, Sheriff,” she said reasonably. “I was scared, but I was madder than I was scared. And you can call me Maude,” she finished.
Turned out she was right about at least one thing. Somebody was indeed hiding in the basement. But it wasn’t clear whether mad or scared had the upper hand with Maude at the moment when the intruder came rushing up the stairs and socked her hard enough in the head to flatten her. According to Maude, who was spending the night in the Ivinson Memorial Hospital, the assailant had then hit her several more times, in the head, stomach, and chest, thrown her on the floor and stomped on her back. He’d pulled her up by her hair, gotten her in a choke hold and punched her, and told her she was “lucky he didn’t fucking kill her.” In the process, she reported, she’d only gotten in one good lick on him, smashing the end of the rifle stock against his left ankle so hard that the gun had broken. That was probably a good thing, she observed, because he would certainly have shot her if he could have.
The sheriff, she added, should look for a man who was limping.
She’d tried to get up and run after the culprit. She was a large, strong, determined, and by that time undilutedly furious woman, but the guy had a big head start, and to tell the truth, he’d hurt her pretty badly. By the time she dragged herself to the door and staggered out into Eleventh Street, bloody, dizzy, enraged, there was nobody in sight.
At least she’d had enough sense to go immediately to a neighbor’s and call the police. Dickie had taken the call himself, then sent for the ambulance.
The intruder had broken a basement window and crawled in. Dickie wondered, as Jimmy Buffett gave way to Hoyt Axton singing about dreaming of love in prison, if this particular criminal had a fondness for the sound of things shattering. The man had beaten up Maude and busted windows; he might like to break other things, too. Like brakes. Dickie’s shoulder ached (physical violence always reminded him of that long-ago unpleasantness with the bad guys from Boulder), and he rubbed it. He could imagine the hot-cold peppery taste of just one shot of Cuervo Gold, slipping down his gullet. But if he did that, he’d need a little something to keep him alert enough to think this thing through . . .
Still deaf there, Jesus?
He went into the kitchen, cigarette dangling from his lips. Stuck his mug in the microwave. Pushed high.
Pulled the cup out and drank deeply, and thought about making another pot.
Meg Dunwoodie’s basement was a hideous mess. According to Maude, the boxes that held many of Meg’s papers had been haphazardly organized, to say the least, and Sally had spent the best part of the fall going through the materials, making inventories, arranging things into more or less rational piles. She’d told Maude that she’d decided not to start by reading anything carefully, but instead to begin with identifying and sorting the papers by time, place, and subject matter. She’d left things in precarious, but organized, piles on the floor. Now there was paper scattered everywhere, crumpled and wrinkled and jumbled. Dickie did not like to think about how Sally would react when she got a load of that basement.
Dickie had no idea what the guy had been looking for, or whether he’d found it. The mad disarray of papers bespoke frustration. Sniffing the air, he’d smelled something burnt, and rooted around until he found a cigarette butt ground out hard in the middle of what looked like a typescript of a poem on watermarked vellum paper. Dickie read a few lines, realized he hadn’t seen that arrangement of words before, and found himself furious at the thought that some scumbag had put out a fucking butt on an unpublished Margaret Dunwoodie poem. He stepped on the anger and bagged the butt and the typescript for evidence. He smiled grimly and enjoyed the thought that this bastard hadn’t reckoned on dealing with a cop who loved poetry.
Maude was going to be okay. Her face would be a mess, and she’d hurt all over for a couple of days, and she’d have trouble swallowing for a week or so, but nothing was broken. She was also the kind of woman who could be a help or a nuisance to the police, and she was plainly pissed off. He let his deputy work methodically through the crime scene while he accompanied Maude to the hospital, and put a little energy into convincing her that her best course lay in trusting the police to see about justice. He wasn’t convinced he’d been successful. Her bruised and spattered mouth reminded him of Clint Eastwood when she thanked him politely and told him she was sure they’d “get the prowler and find out what was going on, one way or another.”
Just what he needed: a six-foot Social Security vigilante. And who the hell knew how Mustang Sally was likely to react (he recalled the night she’d tried to run over Sam Branch). He knew he ought to be around when she first saw the wreckage in that basement, but he
wasn’t looking forward to the experience.
Fact was, he’d been keeping half an eye on the Dunwoodie place for quite a while, and had stepped the pace up to a full eye after Josh had told him about the chromedome in the land shark. And Dickie knew who it was. The guy was no rocket scientist—he’d just sat there in front of the house, three or four times a week, assuming nobody would notice. Josh got the license plate numbers early in September. County five Wyoming plates. Nineteen sixtynine Pontiac Catalina, registered to one Shane Parker, age twenty-four, at an address just south of Albany, Wyoming.
Shane had a sheet. Busted for pot in 1988. A couple of charges—no convictions—on B & E. Passing bad checks. Carrying a concealed weapon. Possession and distribution of methamphetamine, convicted in 1995, served six months in Rawlins, then conviction overturned on appeal, on a technicality.
But there were things Dickie knew that didn’t show up on his record. Such as that Shane qualified as Laramie’s closest thing to a skinhead. That he had been seen around town with strangers who shared his grooming habits and presumably his loathesome politics. That people whispered about guns and dope and neo-Nazi stuff. And that, according to that fountain of local history Delice Langham, Shane Parker was the great-great-grandson of Wilton Shepherd Parker, who’d been the brother of Gertrude Parker Dunwoodie, Meg’s mother. When he’d asked Maude about it, she’d admitted that yes, she’d recognized her assailant as a no-good distant cousin of Meg’s and a bad neighbor of her own.
Dickie’d gone out to Albany looking for Shane Parker, but nobody was home when Dickie knocked on the door of the decaying ranch house. There were tire tracks in the snow in the turnaround at the end of the driveway, so somebody had been home recently. Judging from the treads, the tires were regular car tires and pretty bald— more than likely Shane’s Pontiac. There were bootprints, too, one deeper than the other: The driver was limping. But the falling snow was fast burying those tracks and really coming down by then, and Dickie had to get back to town or face the possibility of being stuck in Albany for a couple of days. He banged on the door one more time, then got in the cruiser and headed back. He was disappointed at not getting to talk to Shane Parker.
Maude hadn’t been able to say if anything was missing from Meg’s basement, and since they didn’t know where Sally was—somewhere on the road, maybe snowbound, maybe not—Dickie couldn’t ask her. But he had a kind of bad feeling about what was shaping up. And Dickie Langham had learned to trust bad feelings, the kind that froze your lungs and sent electrical impulses into your bowels and down your legs. He’d learned a lot about that kind of shock while he was on the run. Doing law enforcement in Albany County, Wyoming, wasn’t usually very scary or thrilling, but he’d certainly encountered that freezing crackling a time or two. He’d learned to associate it with something evil—a screaming man, a terrified child, a woman with blank eyes. He knew that for all his long history of sinfulness, he wasn’t a bad guy. What he hadn’t learned, evidently, was how to cope with even a hint of evil without wanting to get wasted.
He looked at the revoltingly full, smoldering ashtray next to him. Went ahead and lit another cigarette anyway. He poked the fire, wished to hell Mary were home. Stared out the window some more. All at once, outside his window, snowflakes danced in the beams of headlights. He heard the quiet scrunch of tires packing down deep falling snow, the sound of a car door. 2:15 a.m. It might or might not help, but Brit was home. He felt a rush of relief, or maybe even happiness.
He knew she’d be in a toxic mood. Who wouldn’t be, if they’d just worked a double shift at Foster’s Country Corner, one of Laramie’s two very busy truck stops, on a night when they’d closed down I–80 going west and would close it eastbound before the night was over and half the truck drivers in the country had braved black ice and ground blizzards only to fetch up in Laramie when they were headed for turkey and pumpkin pie?
“Fifteen fucking dollars,” Brit snarled, tracking snow on the carpet, tossing off her hat and gloves, draping her jacket on the stair rail. She threw her tips down on the coffee table and slammed into the kitchen to pour herself a glass of white zinfandel from the wine-in-a-box Mary kept in the fridge. “The kitchen said they turned a Number Four Breakfast every three minutes. The problem was, we were taking like ten orders a minute. Daddy, I would testify in court that I personally served two hundred heartattack specials between seven and two. Those goddamn truckers must’ve been saving their change for the juke box. They played ‘Margaritaville’ at least sixty times.” Dickie was glad he’d put on Les McCann and Eddie Harris before she’d gotten home—jazz was so much more credible than oldies.
“That does suck,” he agreed supportively. “Look, I know it’s what you always dreamed of doing, but maybe it’s time to give up your lifelong ambition of a career as a truck-stop waitress and settle for the barren existence of a soul-impaired but extremely wealthy finance capitalist.”
Brit snorted. She enjoyed the fact that her dad, who looked for all the world to see like Baby Huey in a khaki shirt and a holster, was a witty guy. “The civilians were even worse. At least the truckers know enough to tank up and go back to their sleeping cabs and get drunk and watch Letterman. The families expect you to, like, substitute extra turkey for bacon on their club sandwiches, run down to some jogger’s supply store in Boulder to find them their fat-free mayonnaise, and make them a reservation at a motel with free continental breakfasts.” She glugged down the glass of wine and went back for more.
Dickie wasn’t at all tempted to join her—pink wine was beyond even his addict’s craving. Besides, he realized, his problem had been lonesomeness as much as anything else. He lifted his mug and for the first time in hours, tasted the coffee. It tasted terrible, but that was okay with him—he’d never made a decent cup of coffee in his life. She returned and flopped down in the brown plaid easy chair across from him. He wanted her to talk more. “So who were your absolute worst customers of the night?”
“That’s way too easy,” said Brit, leaning forward, setting down her wine and taking off the thick glasses she wore to work, rubbing the lenses on the skirt of her dumpy uniform to clean off droplets of melting snow. “About eight-thirty, there was a little scuffle at the diesel pump. These trucks had come in that looked like part of a US Army convoy, but weren’t. Seems like some guys had pumped thirty gallons into this big camo rig and the pump didn’t shut off, so the diesel was, like, gushing out all over the ground.
“The guys with the trucks were, like, very scary—there were like a dozen of them, shaved bald and jarhead haircuts, really pumped up, really buff, and all squinty-eyed mean. A couple pretty tattooed up. It wasn’t the army— the gas guys said the truck doors probably had some kind of logo painted on them, but they’d covered the doors with canvas. This real big ugly one got really mad about the problem with the pump. He went into the booth and grabbed the attendant out and, like, got all yelling about how he wasn’t going to pay for spilled gas. The attendant went out and tried to make them pay, and they started doggin’ him big-time.”
“Not smart,” Dickie said. His rule had always been when in doubt, give up or run. He’d changed the rule somewhat lately, but he wasn’t all that sure he’d been wrong before.
“No, not smart. One of the camo guys punched his face in. He’s in Ivinson Memorial.”
Dickie made a mental note to drop in on the hapless gas station attendant and get what information he could on the mysterious military convoy, when he went to the hospital in the morning to visit Maude.
“Why didn’t you call me?” Dickie asked.
“Mr. Howitz said he didn’t want ‘police involvement.’ Here was one of his employees with his nose gushing out blood and the manager gets all exercised about how we weren’t ‘servicing the customer,’” Brit said with disgust, taking a big hit of the white zin. She hated the manager at Foster’s. “‘The customer’s always right!’” she mimicked savagely. “Anyway, he said we had to give the whole sickass Oklahoma City�
�bombing batch of them a free dinner, in the interest of customer relations. So we end up feeding these scumbags steak dinners, all in my station, and they order all kinds of extras and desserts and all this shit they think of while they’re slopping ketchup all over their porterhouses, and when one of their fearless leaders gets up to go, you know what he tells me?” she asked, clenching her teeth.
“I can’t imagine,” he admitted.
“No, you can’t,” she said, tiring suddenly as she drank her wine and watched him light a cigarette. “Dad, these dickheads ordered like three hundred dollars’ worth of food and didn’t leave me one dime. This one guy told me I was lucky they were comping the meal, because truly free people despised tipping, and he usually calculated the tab by figuring the cost of the meal and taking off the tax, because, he said, ‘Free people don’t pay for welfare chiselers who hold society back.’ I should consider myself tipped because he wouldn’t make me pay the tax, and furthermore, because it would make me struggle harder to prove my fitness to survive.”
“Jeez,” Dickie said. He’d seen some lousy tippers, starting with most cops, but this was a new and goofy one. “Your thoughts?”
“I thought about ripping his lungs out, miserable pig,” she said, “but I figured I’d lose my job.” She got up and poked the fire.
“That’s my girl,” Dickie said, moving to the fireplace and putting on one more log. “You could be a finance capitalist yet.” Give it to Brit: She had a good feeling for the despicable. Dickie’d known his share over the years, knew they’d carved out a cavernous niche since the ’80s, knew they found places to den up in wide, scarcely patrolled country. There were doubtless plenty of people in his own county who would piously quote the Constitution on the necessity of meeting potential government tyranny with a “well-regulated militia.” But Dickie had seen neighborhood thugs before. Anyone who couldn’t spot them was either one of them or likely to be useless later on, Dickie thought, feeling more than a little paranoid. Hell, he was the sheriff. He got to decide what was worth worrying about and what to heave.
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