Cold Skies

by Thomas King

  “I hear our Thumps is going to play sheriff while you’re away.”

  “He needs the money,” said the sheriff.

  “No, I don’t.”

  “He wants to buy a stove that costs more than my car.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Your car’s free,” said Beth. “City pays for it.”

  “The other car,” said Duke.

  “The Buick with the cracked block?” said Thumps, trying to even the conversation.

  Duke paused and considered Thumps. “You really make a living taking pictures of trees and clouds?”

  “I take pictures of rocks and rivers, too.”

  “How much you charge for a small photograph?”

  “I’ll give you one for free,” said Thumps, “if you promise to leave me alone.”

  Beth snorted. “When you two are all done bonding, you might want to have a word with the recently departed James Lester.”

  “You know who killed him?” said Duke.

  “I don’t do who,” said Beth.

  Thumps’s arm continued to ache. “Maybe someone gave him a physical.”

  “Okay,” said the sheriff, “murder or suicide?”

  “At this point,” said Beth, “you can take your pick.”

  “Not much of an answer.”

  “Gunshot wound to the side of the head.” Beth handed the sheriff a plastic container. “This was in his brain.”

  The sheriff held the crumpled lump of lead up to the light. “Any other wounds?”

  “Nope.”

  “Don’t suppose there’s any chance of matching this bullet to the gun we found at the motel.”

  “Does this look like CSI: Las Vegas?” Beth walked to the far side of the table. “Angle of the wound doesn’t discount suicide. Powder burns and stippling. There’s a lot that feels like suicide.”

  “But?” Thumps moved his fingers one at a time to make sure they all worked.

  “Not enough blood,” said Beth. “Head wound like that should have more blood.”

  Hockney hitched his pants. “You saying he was dead before he was shot?”

  “Only reason to explain the absence of blood is if Lester’s heart had stopped working before he was shot.”

  “So, it’s not suicide.”

  “Didn’t say that.” Beth shook a finger at the sheriff. “All I’m saying is the gunshot didn’t kill him.”

  “So how did he die?”

  “That’s a better question.”

  “And you don’t know.”

  “I don’t know yet,” said Beth.

  “We’re just charging right along, aren’t we?” Hockney took off his Stetson and ran a handkerchief around the sweatband. “Lester dies of causes unknown. Maybe it’s murder. Maybe it’s suicide. Maybe it’s natural causes. And after he’s dead, someone shoots him and moves the body.”

  Thumps eased himself to a standing position. “Maybe the body was moved before it was shot.”

  “Possible,” said the sheriff, “but not particularly helpful.”

  “How about you boys go play somewhere else.” Beth picked up a small electric saw. “When I have more to tell you, I’ll call.”

  Duke settled his hat back on his head. “Maybe you should give Beth a hand with the rest of the autopsy. You know, reacquaint yourself with the essentials of law enforcement.”

  “Now there’s a great idea,” said Beth. “And just what am I supposed to do with him when he passes out?”

  “Sheriffs aren’t allowed to pass out,” said Hockney. “Even acting ones.”

  THUMPS TOOK THE STAIRS slowly, one at a time. His arm felt almost normal now, but he kept it close to his side. The street was quiet. The afternoon sun was bright, but the spring air was still wearing a chill. As he headed home, Thumps half-expected to hear Duke come charging up behind him with one of Andy’s old uniforms tucked under his arm and a new inventory of reasons as to why he should play sheriff.

  But the only sound in the world was the west wind sliding off the east side of the mountains on its way to warm up the land.

  Eight

  The house next door had been vacant for over a year. Thumps had watched potential buyers march in, and he had watched them march out. The realtor, a friendly guy named Ray or Clay, had stopped by to see if Thumps was interested in buying the property as an investment.

  “Real estate in Chinook is hot right now,” Ray or Clay had said.

  Thumps asked the obvious question. If the market was hot, why hadn’t the house sold.

  “Vision,” the agent had told him. “In real estate, it’s all about vision.”

  Thumps remembered Ora Mae telling him that real estate was all about location.

  “Why don’t you take a look,” the man had said. “I think you’ll fall in love with the place.”

  So Thumps had looked. There was nothing wrong with the house. It was, in many ways, Thumps’s house. With a tired paint job, a sloping floor, mismatched kitchen appliances, and a musty smell in the bathroom that made Thumps think of porta-potties in state parks.

  “The owner’s motivated.”

  Actually, the owner wasn’t motivated. The owner was dead. The house was part of an estate sale, but Thumps supposed that Ray or Clay wasn’t keen on sharing that information with prospective buyers, in case someone made the obvious but erroneous connection between the smell in the bathroom and Karl Vogler’s death.

  Karl had a daughter. Debbie. Thumps had met her when she came up from Los Angeles to bury her father. She cleaned the house, sold what she could, tossed everything else into a dumpster, put the house up for sale, and flew back to Los Angeles. Thumps suspected that the two of them had not been close, but he also knew the unpredictable nature of grief.

  No one knew that Karl had died. Not immediately. It was Rose Twinings, Thumps’s neighbour four doors down, who noticed that Karl hadn’t been out for his daily walk.

  “I suppose you know the story of the man who lived here,” said the real estate agent.

  “I live next door.”

  “He died in the hospital,” said Ray or Clay. “The rest is just urban legend.”

  That August, Thumps had stood at his front window and watched Beth take Karl’s body out of the house. It was not a pretty sight.

  “Karl died in the house, in his recliner.”

  “It’s misinformation like that,” said the agent, “that hurts the economy.”

  AS THUMPS CAME up the sidewalk, he noticed three things. One, Freeway was pasted to the front window, as though she had seen a carton of kitty treats strolling down the street. Two, the real estate sign at the Vogler place had a sold sticker on it. And three, there was a tall, thin man standing on the porch with a pile of dirty laundry at his feet.

  The man smiled and waved, and Thumps waved back.

  “You must be Mr. Awfulwater.”

  “DreadfulWater,” said Thumps. “You buy the house?”

  The man stepped off the porch. As he did, the pile of laundry stood up and followed him across the lawn.

  “I’m Virgil Kane,” said the man. “You know, like the Robbie Robertson song? Only with a K.”

  “Thumps.”

  “Most people just call me Dixie.”

  “Dixie?”

  “Virgil Kane?” said the man. “‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’? Get it?”

  “Clever.”

  “And this is Pops.”

  Thumps was pretty sure that Pops was a dog.

  “He’s a Komondor,” said Dixie. “Real friendly, but he tends to fart a bit.”

  “Great.”

  “That your cat?”

  Freeway was racing back and forth on the sill with her mouth open and her paws beating at the glass.

  “Maybe Pops and your cat can be friends.”

  “Freeway?”

  “I used to have a cat,” said Dixie. “She and Pops got along real well.”

  Thumps tried to imagine Freeway and Pops frolicking through the neighb
ourhood together.

  “I do computer programming and web design. And I’m into organic gardening. How about you?”

  “Photography.”

  “Hey,” said Dixie, “maybe we can do some business. I’m always looking for images for websites.”

  Thumps started to say something about photographs and computers when he was suddenly dropped into a septic tank.

  “Sorry,” said Dixie. “That’s Pops. The move has been hard on him.”

  Thumps had to blink several times to clear his vision. He tried to remember if he had any gum.

  “I better get back to unpacking,” said Dixie. “Maybe when the dust clears we can sit down and have some coffee.”

  “Sure.” Thumps glanced at Pops and wondered how any animal could produce such a stench and still be alive. “That’d be great.”

  “You like chickens?”

  “Chickens?”

  “Yeah,” said Dixie. “I was thinking about building a coop in the backyard.”

  THUMPS STOOD ON his front porch and waited for the wind to blow the smell of Pops’s digestive tract out of his clothes. Freeway was waiting for him when he came through the door. She twisted herself around his leg for a moment and then ran snarling out of the kitchen.

  “It’s not that bad.”

  The cat’s bowl was empty. Freeway had been eating more than usual lately but was not gaining any weight. Maybe she was exercising when Thumps wasn’t looking. It didn’t seem possible. The only physical activities Freeway engaged in were yawning and stretching.

  Thumps picked up the bag of cat food and gave it a shake. Freeway made a brief appearance at the doorway. She looked at Thumps and then she looked at the empty bowl.

  “You want to play sheriff for a week?”

  Thumps liked Duke. And he didn’t mind doing crime-scene photographs when no one else was available. He had even helped the sheriff with the occasional investigation. But after Eureka and the aftermath of the Obsidian Murders, Thumps had put his badge and his gun away, and that’s where they were going to stay. Duke would find someone else to look after the office when he and Macy went off to Costa Rica.

  Or the sheriff could stay home.

  Thumps settled in a chair. Freeway slipped around the doorway and climbed on the bag of food, but Thumps was too tired to care.

  “Open it yourself,” he told the cat. “Use your thumbs.”

  THE OBSIDIAN MURDERS. All these years and the case could still come out of nowhere and overwhelm him. The Northern California coast. The summer had started off the way summers on the coast always started. Foggy days that turned sunny around noon and then ran back to fog. By the end of August, ten people had been murdered, their bodies laid out in a strange, ritualistic fashion along the beaches between Fields Landing and McKinleyville, a small piece of black obsidian left in their mouths. Five women, four men.

  And a child.

  There had been no pattern to the killings, nothing to link the victims except their deaths. Anna Tripp and her daughter, Callie, had been the last. A mother and her young daughter. Thumps had just come back from a forensics conference when their bodies were found on a stretch of beach below Trinidad Head.

  He and Anna hadn’t married. They hadn’t even lived in the same house. Anna’s choice. But they had been lovers, and during their time together, Thumps had, in small but significant ways, become Callie’s father.

  That summer the killings had started suddenly. Then they stopped just as quickly. And the police were left holding nothing but sand and fog. Three months after he buried his family, Thumps resigned from the force, packed his truck, and headed north and east for no better reason than that’s the way the roads ran.

  Just outside Chinook, the Volvo had thrown a fuel pump, and Thumps wound up stuck in the town. Frost was already in the air and, as he waited for a replacement to be shipped from Salt Lake, an early blizzard had come down from Canada. The roads were closed for the better part of a week, and by the time they had been cleared, he realized that he had no place to go.

  So he stayed. Everybody died somewhere, and, for Thumps, Chinook had looked to be as good a place as any.

  “YOU WANT A TREAT?”

  Freeway had an extensive vocabulary, but there was only a handful of words that could capture her attention. “Treat” was at the top of the list. Thumps forced himself off the chair. He took down the box of Kitty Num-Nums and shook out a handful of brown pellets that smelled like dead fish. Freeway slid off the bag and inhaled the treats whole.

  “Don’t be throwing up on the rug.”

  BUT HE DIDN’T DIE. One morning he woke up and the pain wasn’t as bad as it had been. Day by day, in small increments, he made his way to where he could go to bed at night and wake up in the morning without feeling as though he had somehow killed Anna and Callie himself. He was not to blame. He understood that. But peace was fleeting and thin, and in the darkness that forms around sorrow, his own voice reminded him that neither had he caught their killer.

  Death was a funny business. Whenever he saw a dead animal along the side of the road, he wondered if it had had a lover, children, a family, and yet, even if he knew the answer, he also knew that, in the end, he wouldn’t stop.

  Wouldn’t even slow down.

  THE PHONE SAVED HIM from slipping under water.

  “Thumps?”

  “Hey, Claire.”

  “Just thought I’d call to see how you’re doing.”

  Women, Thumps decided years ago, had a need to know what people around them were doing every minute of the day. It wasn’t curiosity exactly, and it wasn’t control. It was more as though they were keeping track of the world so that if anyone hit them with a pop quiz, they’d have the right answer.

  “Does Beth have the results yet?”

  Archie had been working overtime.

  “I just had the blood test today.”

  “Blood test?” Claire sounded confused. “What blood test?”

  Thumps groaned silently. “The autopsy results, right?”

  “The tribe is co-hosting the water conference. James Lester was to be our keynote speaker. We were supposed to get together today for lunch.” Claire paused. “Why did you have a blood test?”

  “Why would you call me about the autopsy results?”

  “Roxanne said you were acting sheriff.”

  So, it was Hockney who was working overtime. “I’m not acting sheriff. Duke is just kidding.”

  “Didn’t sound like he was kidding.”

  “He’s going to Costa Rica. He wants me to be acting sheriff.”

  “Okay,” said Claire, not missing a beat. “Then tell me about your blood test.”

  Freeway had made her way to the top of the scratching post, so she could watch as Thumps tried to explain that he wasn’t sick, that he had just got the blood test as part of a normal physical, that, yes, he was a little tired, but that it was nothing to worry about.

  “So you’re tired.”

  “A little.”

  “And you’re nauseous.”

  “Sometimes.”

  Thumps couldn’t tell if the tone in Claire’s voice was concern over his health or annoyance that he hadn’t mentioned his health problems before now.

  “All right,” said Claire, her voice softening. “Call me when you have the blood test results. I don’t want to hear about them from someone else.”

  Okay, so it was concern and annoyance. Thumps dragged himself to the sofa and lay down. Perhaps he should take lessons from Freeway and just ignore everyone and live life on his own terms. Now if he could just find someone who would feed him.

  THUMPS HADN’T REMEMBERED falling asleep, but here he was waking up.

  “Hey, uncle.”

  He could feel Freeway curled up in a warm ball behind his knees.

  “You alive?”

  There were only so many people Thumps could imagine standing over him when he awoke from a nap. Cooley Small Elk was not one of them.

  “The doo
r was open. I thought maybe you had died.”

  “Cooley?” Thumps tried to sit up, but the cat wasn’t interested in moving or being moved.

  “Old people do that sometimes. Lie down and don’t get up.” Cooley grabbed a chair from the kitchen and sat down with a thud. “You want something to eat?”

  Thumps looked at his watch. He’d been asleep almost two hours yet the feeling of fatigue was still there.

  “Sleeping always makes me hungry.”

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “Okay,” said Cooley, and he stood up and ambled to the refrigerator.

  Most people who saw Cooley for the first time made the mistake of thinking that the man was fat and slow. It was an easy mistake to make, and depending on your circumstances, the error could be minor and embarrassing or major and fatal. There was little fat on Cooley’s frame. He was simply huge. And fast. Thumps had seen him move, when moving was important.

  “You got any ham or chicken?”

  What Thumps appreciated most about the man was his innate intelligence and his gentle nature. Cooley seldom had a harsh word for anyone, and you had to work hard to get him angry. Thumps liked the man, but he always had the uneasy feeling that he was standing next to an impending avalanche.

  “You want this juice?”

  “Help yourself.”

  Cooley wandered back to the chair with a sandwich on a plate. From what Thumps could see, Cooley had shoved all of the leftovers in the refrigerator between two pieces of bread. Just beneath the romaine was what would have been his dinner.

  “You’re out of tomatoes,” said Cooley. “Butter’s almost gone, too.”

  Cooley wasn’t as slow getting to the subject as Moses Blood, but he liked to take his time, especially if he was eating. Truth be told, Thumps wasn’t all that keen on getting off the sofa.

  “I need to go shopping.”

  “You should try the new sourdough bread that Milton is bringing in from Great Falls.”

  Cooley hadn’t come all the way to town just to tell Thumps about Chinook’s newest selection in bread.

  “You plan on stopping by Moses’s place anytime soon?”

  “Moses?”