by Allen Kent
“We’ve had a couple of sightings down in the south part of the county,” I told him. “And one got hit up on I-44 west of Springfield. They’re around.”
“What can I do to stop them?” He stroked the head of the dead animal with a rough hand. “I gotta find a new dog. Gonna be hard to find one as good as Rupert.”
I nodded. “He was a good one,” I again agreed. “You want some help burying him somewhere?”
Farley shook his head. “I’ll do it myself. Need to spend a little more time with the old boy. But what about this lion?”
“I’ll call Conservation. Have Jess Traynor come out. They’ll want to know about it and can help you trap the thing or hunt it down. If it’s killing livestock, they’ll want to get rid of it.” I thought for a moment, then asked, “You didn’t hear Rupert making a fuss? Pyrenees usually make a racket as soon as anything comes near.”
Farley shrugged his massive shoulders. “Like I say, I think he got ambushed. Sprung on him from above or something.” He frowned down at the guard dog. “But I h’aint been payin’ the attention I normally do. My innards has all been balled up, Tate. H’aint had a good shit in over a week.”
I glanced again at Miriam whose eyes had doubled in size and jaw dropped open. Marti was out of sight behind us. I tried to look thoughtful.
“Might be good to be checked. That can get to be serious if you let it go.”
Farley’s mouth disappeared into his chin fur. “Naw. I got her taken care of. Got a piece of coat hanger and pried out the turd that was blockin’ me up.”
I had to turn away, clamping my own jaw shut to stifle a belly laugh. When sure I could keep it under control, I muttered, “You need to be careful about that, too, Farley. You’ll be injuring yourself inside.”
“Hell, I know that,” he mumbled. “I bent a loop in the thing so’s it didn’t have no points. Slid in there pretty easy. Think I got her cleared out.”
I turned and winked at Miriam. “Glad you got the plumbing working,” We started back toward the front of the trailer. “This is one I think Conservation will want to get involved in. I’ll call them on the way back to town. You sure I can’t help you with Rupert?”
“I got it,” he said. “Thanks for coming out, Tate.” He turned to Miriam. “You learn anything, girl?”
She pressed her mouth into a firm, tight line to suppress a smile and nodded quickly. “Sheriff Tate said it would be interesting,” she said. “And I’m really sorry about your dog.”
He nodded grimly. “He was a good ’un. But life goes on.”
She turned with me and headed toward the car, the girl again clutching at her sides as if cramps were rippling through her thin body. Before we were completely turned in the drive, she began to sputter as if she’d gulped a mouthful of water into her lungs.
“You okay?” I asked, glancing over to see her nodding in short bobs while she struggled to contain her laughter.
“You learn anything, girl?” I asked in my best imitation of Farley’s gravelly bass.
Mariam couldn’t hold it in any longer, doubling forward against her seatbelt, her laughter growing with every bump in Farley’s rutted lane. The sight of the girl struck us like the blast from the seat of the goat man’s filthy overalls, and Marti and I began to chuckle with her. The craziness of the morning swept through the car like a case of the flu. When we reached the county road, I managed to steer the cruiser onto the shoulder. With the radio crackling a morning report about a heavy backup on US 60, we clutched red-faced at our sides and guffawed like drunken sailors, tears streaming down the girl’s blush-tinted cheeks while Marti threw open her door to gasp for air.
When I was able to focus again on driving, I pulled out onto the county road and turned toward town. Miriam pulled a Kleenex from her pocket, wiped at her eyes, and took a couple of long, slow breaths. She glanced back quickly at Marti, who was still sniffling, then over at me. Seeing the two of us laugh ourselves silly seemed to have given the girl permission to tell me why she’d wanted this ride-along in the first place. She glanced shyly again at Marti, then said, “Mr. Tate, I’ve heard people say you were going to marry an Arab woman. Is that true?”
Ahh. Here it came! “Yes. That’s true,” I said, smiling over at her.
“Where was she from?”
“Chicago. But we met in Bahrain where we were both interpreters for the U.S. Embassy there.”
“Where was her family from?” She glanced at me in quick bursts, diverting her eyes back to the passing fields.
“Her family was Palestinian. Her parents came to the states when they were forced out of their home in the Golan Heights back in the nineteen-sixties. A town called Quneitra.”
“Oh, yeah. We went down there as a family once. To where we could look over into the Golan Heights. There were still some big Palestinian camps in Syria then, not too far from there.” Her mind wandered off for a silent moment, then she asked, “She was Muslim?”
“Yes. Not especially devout, but she called herself Muslim.”
“And her parents were alright with her marrying you?”
I couldn’t stifle a chuckle. We were five minutes past Farley Buzzard’s bent coat hanger and Miriam Haddad was deep into my personal life. What was this all about?
“No,” I admitted. “I’d say they weren’t alright with it. But I didn’t have any problem with her being whatever she wanted to be, so they were beginning to come around.”
“And then she died?” She finally looked over and kept her eyes on me, wondering, I think, what emotion might show. I had told the story a hundred times, or a thousand, but never to a fifteen-year-old who seemed more than just curiously interested. I found myself doing my own window gazing to make sure she didn’t see the quick blinking. Marti sat so still and quiet in the back, I knew she was trying to disappear. I nodded slowly, adding a few seconds to steady my voice.
“Yes. She was killed in a bomb attack in Baghdad where we’d been sent to do some interpreting.”
“Baghdad? I thought you said Bahrain?”
“They shuffled us around sometimes when there were big events that needed interpreters. There were two things going on in Iraq that needed more people than they had in-country.”
“Were you with her? When the attack happened?”
Blinking now didn’t do the job. I felt a tear escape down the side of my nose and knew she saw it.
“I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “It’s none of my business.”
I sniffed the tear away and gave her a lame smile. “No. I don’t mind talking about it. But it’s not the finest moment in my life, and it’s still a little hard for me to think about. I wasn’t with her. It was my job to decide who on our team went to which location. I sent her to a hotel in the city where there was some kind of visiting group that needed guides. I took an embassy party. Worst decision of my life.”
She looked over with a serious frown and asked softly, “How did you decide?” I’d rationalized this over and over and wasn’t sure what was true anymore, but I told her the version I’d finally worked out. “The group at the hotel was there on some WHO mission. World Health Organization. Most were women. I thought they’d appreciate having a woman interpreter. Plus, Adeena spoke fluent French, and there was a French delegation. At the embassy party, there were some US senators that I thought maybe I could make some points with. Pretty selfish on my part.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” she murmured in the same muted tones. “You couldn’t have known. And the women thing makes sense to me.”
“I did know that I was inside the Green Zone, and she was outside,” I admitted, wondering why I was sharing all this with a job shadowing ride-along fifteen-year-old kid. “Just by location, she wasn’t as safe.”
Her head shook rapidly back and forth. “I was thirteen when we left Syria. I remember the war. You could never know where you were going to be safe. The Embassy could have been the target as easily as the hotel. You just couldn’t know.”
“It was a terrible place to be,” she muttered to herself, wrapping her arms again to squeeze away a shudder.
We rode without speaking, neither wanting to think again of war and loss. I checked Marti in the mirror. Her eyes blinked quietly back at me. Miriam finally broke the silence. “Did you worry about marrying someone from such a different background?”
Someone, I thought, is showing some interest in this pretty girl, and she’s not certain how to deal with it.
“We had the advantage of her growing up in the states, just as I did,” I said. “But there was still the Chicago versus the Missouri Ozarks thing. And Muslim versus . . .well, not much of anything. We did worry about that a little.”
“Yeah. That would be something. How did your parents feel about it?”
“My father died when I was ten,” I told her. “And my mother while I was in the service. By the time I met Adeena, there were no parents around to worry about it.” I glanced over at her and chuckled. “My dad would have been really upset. He was a hardnosed old mill worker who’d spent a year in Vietnam when he was just a kid. Never talked about it much. But anything foreign was suspicious.”
“Mmm,” she murmured. “I know what that’s like.”
“My mother? She would have loved Adeena.”
“Adeena? That’s a pretty name,” Miriam said. “I’ll bet she was pretty.”
“Very pretty,” I agreed. This time, her eyes misted as only the eyes can of an adolescent girl who intensely feels every pang of love and loss, even when they belong to someone else. I again had to turn to my side window.
“You’re not Muslim. That shouldn’t be a problem for you,” I suggested finally, thinking she might want to tell me why she wanted to know all this.
“No. But we’re Syrian. Most people think all Syrians are Muslim. And we’re Eastern Christians. When it comes to friends, that makes about the same difference to my mother and father. Especially my father.” I waited, but that was all she wanted to say.
13
I have a personal obsession that fits perfectly with being a sheriff but will probably end up killing me. When some problem is unresolved, it eats at me like a cancer.
Our morning with Miriam had ended with a complimentary lunch in the school cafeteria: pepperoni pizza, canned green beans, tossed salad, and my favorite—chocolate milk. We would have suffered awkwardly through the meal had Marti not known every person in the cafeteria and enough about each family to keep some level of conversation going. We shared a round table with two other ride-along teams: one who spent the morning at the branch bank; one at a dog breeding kennel that specializes in boxers. The girl and I couldn’t look at each other without visions of Farley stooped over with his coat hanger tickling a laugh that had to be smothered with a mouthful of pizza. Marti filled in nicely around us. The fourth period bell finally came to the rescue.
Marti and I escaped back to the office where Rocky had done a yeoman’s job of screening the lists and had a summary waiting. He hadn’t been able to reach four of the names, and two he had spoken to didn’t have explanations that seemed satisfying. We shared the story of our morning with Miriam and Farley. Rocky had a few Buzzard stories of his own and laughed until he had to slip into the bathroom to douse his face with cold water. At 4:30, I called Mara Joseph about dinner.
We met at LeeAnn’s café at 6:00. The regulars remembered her from her time in town with the Suskey case and welcomed her like an old friend. Three or four remembered her name.
“You can’t exactly have an intimate little dinner in this town, can you?” she said, half-jokingly. “Reminds me of the theme song from the old Cheers series on TV. ‘Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name. . . .’ And sometimes you don’t. I guess in Crayton, you don’t have much choice, unless you want to sit in your car at Sonic.”
“They’re just interested,” I defended. “Good people. All of them.”
“Interested in you and me being here? In why I’m down here? In what this case is about?”
“Yup. All of that. But mainly, just interested.”
We finished the Wednesday prime rib special and ordered crème brulee, the talk turning back to the case as we waited. I found myself fingering my wine glass, smiling across at her as if captivated by her pretty face and every word she said, and thinking about those damn lists. My attentive gaze must not have been convincing. She stopped in mid-sentence, leaned back in her chair, and said, “Have you heard anything I’ve said?”
“Sure,” I lied. “You were just telling me what you and Rosario thought needed to be done next on the dam bombing.”
“And that was . . . ?”
“Well, let’s see. You were . . . .”
“Yes. That’s what I thought. You have no idea. Where have you been the last five minutes?”
No sense trying to bluff my way out of this one. She was right. I had no idea what she’d just said. “You got me,” I confessed. “I’ve been thinking the name of the person we’re looking for must be on one of those lists from the hotels, and it’s driving me nuts.”
“They’ll be there in the morning. Give yourself a bit of a break. And it’s important that you know what’s going on with the rest of the case. Rosario’s heading back to Washington in the morning. We found other fragments of a demo pack out at the site. Those military kits have been through a re-purposing in the last couple of years—and just in a couple of places. They’re not available on the open market anywhere. It shouldn’t be possible for someone to get ahold of one. He needs to find out if some have turned up missing at one of the munitions depots. That’s as likely as your lists to lead us somewhere.”
I committed to listen more attentively. “And makes it even less likely the Greaves were involved in this somehow. That should make you feel better. What are you planning to do while Rosario’s gone?”
She grinned over at me. “I called again about those warrants you wanted for cameras covering parking areas. Grace should be able to pick them up in the morning. I thought if you were up to a houseguest tonight, I might help you and Marti finish up those lists you can’t get out of your head. A ‘guest room’ type houseguest,” she added quickly.
My mind was suddenly off hotel registrations. “We didn’t resist each other very well the last time you stayed over,” I reminded her. “You sure you want to risk that again?”
“That was my fault. And I promised you I wouldn’t let it happen again.”
“Hmm,” I muttered. “I was hoping you might be weakening.”
She tilted her head apologetically. “Sorry, Tate. But not about that. I’m still trying to get reassigned back to St. Louis. If I get too involved again, it’s going to mess that all up.”
“Then maybe staying at my place isn’t a good idea.”
“I love your place. It’s the most peaceful place I’ve ever been. And it saves me a trip back to Springfield or a night at the Super 8. I can deal with it if you can. Climb in bed and think about hotel lists.”
“I’ll still be hoping you’ll slip in beside me at 3:00 a.m. Last time that pretty well ended thoughts of anything else.”
“As I recall, I found that you were more than ready when I arrived,” she grinned. “But this time, can I stay as a friend without benefits?”
The phone buzzing in my shirt pocket interrupted my saying that I wasn’t about to promise anything. I recognized the number as the health clinic.
“Sheriff Tate,” I answered officially.
“Tate, this is Doc Waterman. I think you may want to get over here as soon as you can.”
I lifted the cell from my cheek and looked at the time. 6:45 p.m. The clinic kept a nurse practitioner on duty until 7:00 on weekdays, but Doc Waterman usually managed to get
away around 5:00. This must be something the NP didn’t feel comfortable treating by herself.
“I’m at LeeAnn’s,” I told him. “I’ll be there in five minutes.” I gave Joseph a disappointed frown. “Something’s up at the clinic. It’s only a couple of blocks away, so I’ll walk over. See if you can cancel the desserts and you can either come along, or drive out to my place and settle in. I’ll be there as soon as I get whatever this is taken care of.”
She folded her napkin onto the table and signaled the waiter. “I’ll come with you. I’d just as soon not be at you place without you, especially when you don’t know how long you’ll be. Plus, I never know what interesting little challenge I’m going to run into when I go somewhere with you.”
We walked the short distance to the clinic, found the outer door locked, but Doc Waterman conferring with the nurse practitioner in the empty waiting area. He hurried to the door and ushered us in, giving Joseph a familiar nod. “I’m glad you’re here, Officer. This is one of those cases I don’t want Tate handling by himself.”
He led us to the rear of the building and into one of the examination rooms. Grace Torres hunched forward at the end of a paper-draped examination table, her left arm wrapped in a fresh cast. She looked up as we entered, curling a badly split lip and a swollen cheek and eye into a painful frown.
“Doc, I told you I didn’t need any help,” she muttered thickly.
“I knew you weren’t going to go to your parents’, and someone’s going to have to look after you for a few days, Grace,” the doctor said emphatically. “Too much activity and you’re going to have permanent damage.”
Joseph stepped self-consciously into a corner beside the door while I pulled a folding chair over and sat in front of my chief deputy. I took her hand, but she winced and pulled it quickly away. The knuckles were scraped raw and covered with salve. I let my hands fall into my lap.
“Did Sal do this to you, Grace?”