“And you want us to tell them what?”
I stared at the phone and then cupped it back to my ear. “To stop filling the coal cars. There must be some kind of emergency number that you can use to get through to them!” I stood there looking up at my impending hundred-ton doom.
“There’s an administration number, would you like me to call that?”
I held the phone to my forehead, attempting to send brain waves telepathically through the air. “No, they’re not going to be in the offices this time of night, and it’s New Year’s Eve, for Pete’s sake; how about an operations manager or the loading facility?”
“Sir, can you move to another spot? The place where you are is awfully noisy . . .”
I held the phone back out and looked at it again, suppressing the urge to bounce it off the metal walls.
“Lady, I’m standing at the bottom of a coal car, and if you don’t get through to someone in the next three minutes they’re going to drop a hundred tons of low-sulfur, anthracite coal on my head like I’m at the bottom of a mine! Now, would you please try and get through to someone at the Black Diamond so that that doesn’t happen? Please!”
I hung up, figuring that if this was the last three minutes of my life, I didn’t want to spend them extraordinarily annoyed.
Walking to the front of the car like a caged prisoner on a three-minute death row, I scanned the walls again, hoping for any kind of irregularity that might provide me with a way out. Seeing nothing, I walked to the back of the car and looked up at the spot where Fry would hopefully appear.
The sound of the coal dropping only a few cars away was so deafening I doubted that anyone would hear me if I called them, but I felt like calling Cady again to tell her all the things she already knew.
I felt like calling Vic and telling her all the things I knew, things we hadn’t discussed, things we should have.
I thought about calling Henry and thanking him for his help with all my harebrained schemes, and for being the best friend anyone could have had.
A granddaughter, at least that’s what Virgil White Buffalo had prophesied on the mountain, when he had also told me that there were dark days ahead—You will stand and see the bad, the dead shall rise and the blind will see . . . Maybe I should’ve listened to him a little closer in the lodge, because I couldn’t come up with a situation that ended more darkly than this one.
Taking a deep breath, I prepared myself for what I was likely going to have to do, maybe scramble up a corner as the thing filled, trying to imagine what the chute was like. As I recalled, it was large and square and started unloading at the front and then moved to the back at three miles an hour, the coal dropping straight down. That wasn’t good, in that I was hoping that the stuff would fill the bottom so that I could keep stepping on it to get high enough to pull myself out.
More than likely, I wouldn’t make it.
The phone rang again, and I looked at it, seeing it was Cady. I punched the button and shouted over the din of the roaring coal dropping into a car that sounded a heck of a lot closer than four away and braced my boots in the snow to keep myself from bouncing around like a Ping-Pong ball.
“Cady?”
I could hear her screaming on the other end of the line, but the noise was so loud that I couldn’t make out the words. “Cady, did you get through?”
There was more, but I still couldn’t hear what she said, not so much for the noise as the sight of the loader methodically moving through the next car in front of me, dropping its tonnage and shifting inexorably toward the car where I stood.
Fry had miscalculated by two cars, not a bad estimate really, and I was no longer in the last car but the next to last.
Less than one car to go.
“Oh, shit . . . ” I looked down at the phone in my hand and then brought it up to my ear. “I know you did the best you could do, punk. I love you.”
I hit the button and looked up, watching the curtain of black descending into the next car, the vibrations of impact causing my car to shudder as if in a death grip.
The dust wafted over the rim and floated back toward me like the transparent veil of some grim reaper. I backed into the bulkhead, forgetting that I was already at the rear and there was nowhere else to go.
Covering my nose and mouth with a glove, I watched the bottom of the chute as big as the doors on the trailer end of an eighteen-wheeler move the length of the car next to me, dropping a hundred tons straight down in a man-made avalanche.
Trying to keep my hands free, I tucked the phone in my pocket even though it continued to vibrate. No matter what happened, no matter the weight of whatever hit me, I was going to have to remember to keep digging up and out of the car.
Backing into the corner because I figured the majority of the coal would drop in the center, I braced my arms and prepared for the next-to-last load of the train. The rumbling noise subsided like a wave having crashed, and I raised my head—if I was going to die, it wasn’t going to be on my knees.
No cars to go.
The gigantic chute was over me, and I could see the operator’s booth, which for some reason had bullet holes in the Plexiglas, the shattered panes spidering cracks out in all directions.
The loader shut down suddenly, and a couple dozen chunks of coal tumbled into the car. I looked straight up, and Fry was hanging over me with the board lying on the rim. “Hey, you okay?”
Looking up at the loading chute and not completely sure I was absolutely out of harm’s way, I caught my breath and coughed, maybe twice. “Um, yep.”
As the noise dwindled, I heard the sound of a very large-caliber pistol going off and heard a spak as another round hit the control room window. The shocked operator lifted his glasses from his eyes and peered through the dust at me, and a familiar voice rose out into the night like the sound of a coyote. “And if you turn that son of a bitch back on I’ll empty the rest of this hogleg into you!”
Fry, with his head turned, was obviously enjoying what I assumed was an epic romantic spectacle of the American West—Lucian Connally, waving the Colt Walker in the air, sitting astride the locomotive behind us. Fry turned and looked down at me with a bright smile. “That old, one-legged boss of yours . . . He’s some kind of loco.”
I croaked a response. “Boy howdy.”
16
“No, I’m all right. Honest.” I reached up and touched the thick bandage the doctors had wrapped all the way around my neck and tried to ignore Sandy Sandburg, two of his deputies, three highway patrolmen, Lucian, and Corbin Dougherty as they tried not to look interested in my call. Standing in the entryway of the Campbell County Memorial Hospital Emergency Room, I leaned against the wall and nodded into Vic’s cell phone. “I know; it was a bad situation, but I’m okay now.”
“So you’re on your way to the airport, right, Dad?”
There was no use lying, she’d inherited her mother’s unerring ability to spot dissembling at every level. “I’ve just got to make a stop on the way.”
“What kind of stop?”
“I’ll make the plane, I promise.” I pulled out my watch and looked at it. “I’ve got an hour and a half, the weather has cleared, sort of, and it’s on the way.”
“I’m going to kill you myself.”
“Honest, I just need to make one more stop to sew things up, then I’m off to the airport.”
I listened to her sighing on the line. “If you don’t, I’m giving the baby your middle name . . .”
I smiled, confident that I was no longer in really big trouble. “Oh, don’t do that.”
“I’m serious.”
I laughed. “What if it’s a girl?”
“Then it’ll be even worse, and she’ll have no one else to blame but you.” Another sigh. “Excuse me for asking, but isn’t there a sheriff’s department in Campbell County and a Gillette police force,
and isn’t Uncle Lucian involved in getting you into this?”
“Well—”
“Is he there?”
“Well—”
“Put him on.”
I glanced at the old sheriff and then tried handing him the phone, but he acted as if I were trying to hand him a stick of dynamite, lit. He brushed the device away with a hand and stepped back into the fluorescent light of the Campbell County Memorial Hospital Emergency Room.
I pulled the phone back to my ear. “I don’t think he wants to talk to you.”
“Hold it out where he can hear me then.”
I did as I was told and listened as she raised her voice to be heard from afar. “Uncle Lucian?”
He looked at the phone, then at me as if I were a dirty rodent, and then snatched the thing out of my hand. He took a deep breath of his own and plastered a smile on his face for the performance. “Hey, Cady, darlin’ . . . How you doin’, honey-bunch?”
For the next two solid minutes, the old sheriff looked at the floor and said nothing except for a few monosyllabic grunts and a few yeps. After the final response, he handed me back the phone and blew out air through his puckered lips.
I listened, but she had already hung up, so I pocketed the cell and looked at him, pale as I’d ever seen him. “We need to get me on that plane at midnight.”
He barked a short laugh with no joy in it. “In no uncertain terms.”
“Did she thank you for saving my life?”
“She did.”
I turned to look at the unofficial eight-man task force. “We don’t need this many people.”
Sandburg laughed and shook his head. “The only one that doesn’t need to be in on this is you.”
“Yep, well . . . I started it, so I’m going to finish it.”
He turned to the assembled manpower. “Run along and try not to be an embarrassment to your collective departments.” They nodded and did as he said, the automatic doors opening and closing, allowing the arctic wind to creep in, always uninvited. “I don’t know if that plane of yours is going to get off the ground tonight. Not with all this fog.”
Walking past him, I paused to let the air in again. “It will clear before midnight.”
—
I held the door open for Lucian, and I helped him climb into my truck but then he stuck a boot out to hold the door open. “How ’bout we just get a head start over to the airport; I got a funny feeling about this one.”
I stood there, the cold trying to creep up the backside of my Fauxhartt Kmart special coat that the hospital staff had returned to me. “You getting scary in your old age?”
“Maybe so.” He didn’t move but sat there with his boot still propped in the door—a spanner in the works, Lucian style. “In all my years on the job, I don’t think there’s ever been a situation I’ve looked forward to less.”
“Maybe you’re the one who should sit this one out.”
He studied the sticker on my dash, the one that read WARNING, USE OVERDRIVE IN HIGH SPEED PURSUIT, and the addition Vic had made in marker below that read AND DO NOT SHOOT THROUGH WINDSHIELD. He started to say something but then stopped and then started again. “I warned her that you were like a gun; that we had to be careful where we pointed you . . .”
I thought about how it had all started, how it had been a favor for a woman with a set of legs that didn’t work because of a carefree accident with to-go cups so long ago. I thought about how it had been a search to find out why a man who had never broken a rule in his life had checked into the Wrangler Motel, locked the door, and taken his life. “I’m sorry.”
He looked at me. “For what, doing your job?”
I nodded. “This job is hateful sometimes.”
His jaw clamped shut, but the words still escaped. “If I never taught you anything, I taught you that a long time ago.” He moved his foot and gestured toward the door. “Now close that damn thing before I catch my death.”
I shut it and thought to myself that it would take a sight more than that to kill Lucian Connally, and then walked around the back of my truck as the Campbell County Sheriff’s car pulled up and stopped, the Campbell County Sheriff rolling the window down and airing an elbow. “How ’bout you just head on out to the airport, Walt?”
I stopped and looked into the muted distance at the southern hills. “Why is every cop in Wyoming trying to get rid of me?”
“We like you; that’s what we do with people we like.” He shrugged and gestured toward Dougherty, sitting in his passenger seat. “Right?”
The patrolman smiled a thin grin.
“You’re playing backup on this one, Sandy, I don’t even want you in the house.”
He studied me. “You’re sure about this, huh?”
“Yep.”
“It’s going to be a big deal.”
I pulled my keys from my pocket. “Look on the bright side.”
“What’s that?”
“Your family’s not involved after all.”
I climbed in the Bullet and began the slow drive to the west of town and the Iron Horse subdivision. The weather didn’t seem to be getting that much better, and although the snow had stopped, the term “socked in” kept coming to mind, and I started thinking about promises. There was supposed to be more weather tomorrow, but I hoped to be gone long before then.
The whole case wasn’t ending the way I’d hoped it would, but that was usually the scenario in my line of work. I drove carefully on the unplowed Echeta Road, guiding the tires in an almost out-of-body experience. I looked over at Lucian, but he was staring out the passenger-side window, lost in his own thoughts. In some ways, I’m sure he was sorry that we’d ever become involved in this investigation, but like me, he knew that you had to ride the trail till it ended. It was a lonely pursuit we had chosen and one that always finished with reading one more report, making one more phone call, or knocking on one more door—and reading one more person their rights, if you were lucky.
I took a right and then pulled up to the railroad crossing and stopped, making sure I looked both ways.
“I bet you’re gonna be a lot more careful around these things, huh?”
I pulled out and made the right into the warren of streets.
—
The only addition to the Holman household was a blue Volvo, sitting in the driveway, but other than that, everything looked the same as it had—even the Santa was still lying in the yard like a New Year’s Eve drunk, the coal dust spread across him like Lucian’s pulverized pepper steak. “You’re not going to reinflate that silly bastard again, are you?”
“Yep, if for no other reason than good luck.” I pushed open the door and started across the yard, picked up good St. Nick, and plugged in the tiny air pump, just as I’d done before. I watched as the sheriff’s car pulled up behind mine and also saw three more deputy cars down the street, along with three from the Highway Patrol.
Sandy, Dougherty, and Lucian met me at the sidewalk as I gestured toward the assorted manpower. “What the heck is that?”
“I told ’em to go away, but they won’t.” The sheriff glanced over his shoulder. “It’s your escort to the airport.”
I glanced at the door. “You’re still not going in.”
“The hell I’m not, it’s my county.”
I cast my eyes at Lucian. “We started this, and we’ll finish it.”
He glanced at us. “You two armed?”
“Nope; there isn’t going to be any shooting.”
He nudged his hat back. “Nice to be sure about those types of things.”
“Yep, it is.” I turned and walked toward the front door with Lucian in tow.
I knocked and then rang the doorbell.
Nothing.
Lucian tried the knob, and the door floated open into the museum-like interior of the Holman home
in a déjà-vu-all-over-again experience. With a glance back at the old sheriff, I entered. Everything was exactly as it had been the first time we’d walked into the place, our boots making strange, crisp sounds on the plastic walkways that crisscrossed the house.
Heading into the kitchen, I stopped when I noticed something out of place, a coffee cup on the kitchen counter with peach lipstick on the rim.
Lucian touched the handle of the mug, turning it with a finger. “Not Phyllis’s shade.”
“Any reason to check the upstairs?”
He shook his head. “Not that I can think of.”
I moved toward the basement door, noticing that the wheelchair was still parked at the top.
There was no muted sound of a ballgame as there had been before, just an uneasy silence and three black screens looking back at the woman. Easing my way past the stair elevator, I stepped to the side and Lucian joined me.
Phyllis Holman wasn’t working; her fingers were laced in her lap over a knitted afghan. At first, I thought it might’ve been a commercial break, but there was no graceful tapping at the letters that would form sentences, that would form paragraphs, that would form the kind of entertainment that would distract people from their lives, lives that sometimes led to the situation we now found ourselves confronting.
The elderly woman stared at the blank screens, dark as the world collapsing around her, and refused to acknowledge our presence.
I stepped forward, positioning myself between two of the monitors. “Mrs. Holman?”
She didn’t respond.
“Mrs. Holman.”
She looked up at me, at first annoyed, but then focused on my face and the bandage around my neck. “You’re hurt.”
I took off my hat. “Yes, ma’am. It’s been a long day.” She nodded and then returned her eyes to the television without saying anything more, and I waited, but not very long. “No game?”
She didn’t look at me this time. “No.”
I nodded and stepped in a little closer. “We’re looking for your daughter—we’re looking for Connie.” She said nothing. “Mrs. Holman?”
Any Other Name: A Longmire Mystery Page 26