by Ben Tripp
BANG
Danny bolted upright. Hell of a loud noise.
“Kelley? Are you still up?”
She listened. Nothing. If she had to get out of bed, Kelley was going to catch hell. Then Kelley’s faint voice came through the door:
“Go to sleep, Danny.”
“What are you doing awake?”
“Same thing you are. Waiting for you to go to sleep.”
Kelley opened the bedroom door and looked in. She had that hunted look that made Danny crazy. For fuck’s sake, nobody was hunting her. Kelley had no idea what it was like to be hunted—not for real. But her eyes looked red and puffy.
Maybe Kelley had her own troubles, overblown as they might be. Danny ought to ask if everything was all right, have a little sister-to-sister time. Incoherent and stinking of booze. Maybe not.
“I can’t remember if I took my pills.”
“I dunno.”
“I know you don’t. It was one of those questions.”
“You mean rhetorical.”
“Yes.”
Danny searched her brain for something else to say, something to move the conversation forward a few inches. Nothing occurred to her. Kelley broke the silence.
“You want some water or something? Some ice?”
Danny lay back down on the bed. Wanted to say something meaningful. Nothing volunteered itself.
“Good night, Kelley.”
Kelley closed the door. Danny tried to remember whether she had taken the pills or not. She was pretty sure she had, but they were a lifeline. She found a stray pill on the nightstand, pinched it between numb fingertips, and managed to get it into her mouth. It left a dry, bitter streak down her throat. She should talk to Kelley tomorrow, find out what her plans for the future were.
The summer was coming, the season for temporary jobs cleaning rental cabins, playing lifeguard at the recreational lake. Then college. Did Kelley want to go to college? She was smart. Smarter than Danny. Maybe she could get out of this one-horse shithole of a town.
They should talk. Danny tried to follow events surrounding a burglary on the scanner, the Fontana cops dealing with a freaked-out woman speaking rapid Spanish in her backyard. Somewhere around the third time they tried to get a description of the perpetrator, who might have been the woman’s nephew, Danny drifted into unconsciousness.
They followed the M1A1 Abrams tank toward the MSR—the main supply route around Al Fallujah. Second Tank Battalion was rock-solid. You couldn’t relax merely because there were tanks for protection, but you knew they would pitch in fast and hard if there was a fight on. The trick was to drive straight down their tread tracks if you could, because there wouldn’t be any operational ordnance buried there. Danny hadn’t felt safe in months, but she figured she was with the best guys she could ask for on a regimental combat team. Harlan had her back, and Ramirez, too, even if all he did was give her shit. Spasskey and Duke were good men, but she didn’t really know them—they had replaced the casualties of last week.
They found the burning mud-brick house about a mile before the appointed rendezvous. Whoever owned the house had been building a concrete addition when the war broke out, because there were three walls with rusted rebar sticking out of them, empty doorways and window sockets cast in place but without doors or windows. No roof. Just as well because the place was a write-off now. There was gunfire in the air, but they couldn’t tell where it was coming from. It didn’t seem to be headed their way, but nobody knew who was doing the shooting, or who was being shot at. Could have been some of the multinationals or a squabble between the locals and the so-called Iraqi security forces, a bunch of dangerous tribal gangbangers.
Whatever it was, gunfire was combat team business. They pulled around the burning house and in the flat distance, men were running. Requests and orders cracked around the radios. Air support on the way. But sometimes these incidents were intended to draw air support. The Black Hawks limped home with holes in them. Danny’s team was going to have to go out there and attract some attention. Tanks first, however. But there was a woman in front of the tanks. She was standing beside the house. Danny’s instincts told her it was a setup. But her instincts always told her that. Because the whole fucking war was a setup.
The woman looked like the Grim Reaper, black-veiled from head to feet. Maybe a hardcore Shia Islamist. These were still rare in Iraq, though less so now that fundamentalism was on the rise. Or maybe she was the woman of a mercenary from Iran or Saudi Arabia. Harlan flicked his eyes at Danny: Would she do the honors? Danny dropped down out of the Humvee, Spass-key covering her topside with the M249 SAW gun. Her eyes probed every shadow, her hands were wet on the grip of the Mossberg 12 gauge, but she strode almost casually across the dirt patch that served the house as a front yard. Just a friendly visit, neighbor, couldn’t help notice your house was on fire. You mind stepping aside so the tanks can roll through?
The radios inside the vehicles were going crazy. Danny couldn’t quite hear what they were saying, but something big was going on. Not here. She didn’t see anything here. But somewhere, something was going down. The bell wouldn’t stop ringing—
Danny sprang awake as if shot up from the bottom of the ocean. Her alarm clock was ringing. It was eight o’clock on Saturday morning, Fourth of July weekend, and she was an hour late for roll call at her own Sheriff’s Station. Dispatcher Dave was calling for her on the radio:
“Sheriff Adelman, where the heck are you? Come in, Danny.”
Danny rushed through the house, shoving her rumpled shirt into her pants, jamming feet into boots. Hat over there. Gun belt on the chair. Gun on the table. Note from Kelley. What the hell was this? Out of the official notebook, no less! Danny shoved the gun in the holster, snatched up Kelley’s note, and ran out the door. She had been awake for no more than three minutes.
As she jumped in the cab of the Sheriff’s Department Ford Explorer, another bell rang in the back of her mind.
Danny’s blood turned cold. Something was missing besides Kelley. She blinked at the driveway.
Kelley took the Mustang.
The road descending from the Adelman place into Forest Peak was a scribble of tar a lane and a half wide through the steep woods. It curled upon itself like a rattlesnake gliding through the immense trees: heavy-browed ponderosa pine, Douglas fir with their thick scored skins, young black oaks coming up in the gulleys where the big trees let a little sunlight get through. The slope of the mountain was so steep here that the crowns of the trees on the downhill side were at the same height as the roots of the trees on the uphill side. It was a beautiful place, especially with the morning sun cutting through the mist. Danny took the hairpin turns at forty miles an hour, the Explorer’s tires screaming as they skated from shoulder to shoulder. She could make town in five more minutes. One hand grasping the radio mic, one hand on the wheel, she called in an all-points bulletin on her runaway sister.
A dark shape emerged from the brush at the next hairpin bend—Danny thought for an instant it was a bear. But it was a man, a shambling, filthy man moving with uncertain gait down the steep rocks above the road.
Then he was on the pavement, and Danny’s heel jammed the brake pedal to the floor.
The SUV lost purchase and stuttered over the asphalt in an increasingly sloppy arc, Danny fighting to correct the wheel. She passed within a foot of the red-eyed thing that stumbled across the roadway, and when the Explorer stopped, it was facing the wrong way up the road in an acrid cloud of scorched tires. Another two feet and it would have gone over the edge.
“Jesus Christ,” Danny said, and threw the door open. The passing of the big vehicle had only just registered to the ragged creature now standing in the middle of the road. He blinked at Danny as she climbed down, one hand hooked behind her belt to the handcuffs she kept there, the other hand raised in front of her.
“Goddammit, Wolfman, this is it,” Danny said. She grabbed the man—a foot taller and forty years older—and spun him around ag
ainst the hood of the Explorer. He moved with the underwater grace of the profoundly drunk. Danny could smell the alcohol yeast coming off him in waves, even above the raw-onion stench of his armpits. Wulf Gunnar was what they called a homeless person down in Los Angeles, but a “tramp” up in Forest Peak. He lived in abandoned hunting cabins and moved around some, wintering in the low desert. Made a little money at odd jobs in town. A kind of thorn in the side of the community, Danny thought, but there was something necessary about him, too. Like an old stray dog to remind people they weren’t so bad off. But today Danny was in no mood for strays, and the adrenaline in her system wanted to punish the son of a bitch clean off her mountain. She clapped the handcuffs around his dirt-varnished wrists and he slumped for support on the Explorer, cheek against the metal.
“Gunnar, I warned you last time: You can drink yourself to death, but you can’t do it in public.”
He squinted at her, forming his words with difficulty: “So shoot me then.”
“I about ran you down. That would have done it. What the hell are you doing out here?”
Wulf looked carefully around him, as if “here” was anywhere particular.
“Keepin’ outta town.”
“And I told you to keep out of town, didn’t I.”
Wulf scratched his beard on the shoulder of his grease-blackened fatigue jacket.
“Yes,” he said, at length.
Danny was at an impasse. She could let him go and he might stumble on down the mountain to Ferndale. Or he might loop around until he got to Forest Peak and stink out the tourists and puke in the old horse trough. In either case, Danny was now seriously late.
To hell with it. She hooked Wulf’s elbow and steered him into the backseat of the Explorer, where he lay down on the molded bench and blinked at the armored Plexiglas panel that divided front seats from back. Danny kicked his immense, rotten boots into the compartment and slammed the door. No handles on the inside, so he couldn’t open the door and fall out.
Danny got back up in the driver’s seat, restarted the engine, and stomped the gas pedal. There was a dense thud as Wulf bounced up against the back of the seat, then rolled off onto the floor.
2
Danny took the alley along back of the downhill side of Main Street, and parked behind the Sheriff’s Station, a red-brick block with a glass front entirely out of keeping with the local architecture. It had been the new Post Office in 1954, but there wasn’t enough mail to justify keeping the lights on. The building had been requisitioned for the library after that, but nobody went in for reading much around Forest Peak and the librarian was suspected of being a Red. So in 1971, the Sheriff’s Station was moved out from behind the firehouse on Sawyer Road, and into the refurbished Post Office building. The place hadn’t seen any improvements since then, but the roof was sound and the back room was air-conditioned.
Danny had been a deputy for a couple of years before she went off to Iraq. When she came back and needed a job, she ran for the office of sheriff against Stanley Curtiss Booth, the twenty-year incumbent. He figured she didn’t have a chance, so he didn’t campaign very hard, but referred to his red-haired opponent as “that little carrot-top Adelman girl,” until it became clear Danny’s house-to-house canvassing with her Veterans’ Administration–issue cane was eating away at his advantage. By the time the vote was three days away, he was calling Danny “that gun-crazy bull dyke,” and on election day he called her “a high-toned cripple bitch” to her face, and that was that. Danny had never painted Booth’s name out of the placard that marked the sheriff’s parking space—every time she pulled up into it was a little like kicking his ass out of the job all over again.
There wasn’t any relish in parking the Explorer today, however. Danny leaped out of the driver’s seat and sprinted for the back door of the station, twisting her midlength hair up under her hat. Way to go, she thought, and entered her domain. Deputy Dave Thurin was in the back room at the communications desk, ten minutes from the end of his shift. He lurched to his feet as Danny came in, the radio headphone cord stretching to its limit. Danny waved him back into his chair.
“Anything, Dave?”
“Mrs. Davis reported her son Barry left again—”
“He’s eighteen, it’s his privilege,” Danny said. Clear the bullshit off the blotter. Dave scratched his ear, trying to remember what else was happening even though it was written right in front of him. Danny felt a bubble of anger rising inside her.
“There’s an RV illegal parked out by the gym,” Dave continued, as Danny was about to bark at him, “and some kids with firecrackers—”
“Dave? Kelley. Anything about Kelley.”
Dave shook his head. Danny usually wanted the shift incident reports in detail, but now her thoughts were on her sister. Not to mention the midday ceremony. And she was late. Danny would have to make up for lost time and get her shit wired down tight. And even as Dave changed tracks in his slow-working brain, Danny was suddenly, monumentally hung over. All the moisture left her head at once and her brain was high and dry, resting on bony spines inside her skull.
“Sheriff?” Dave said.
Danny flapped a hand at him and headed for the water fountain on the wall. She sucked down icy draughts, and a little life flowed into her along with the chill in her stomach. The prisoner! Danny had forgotten about Wulf.
“I got Wulf Gunnar in the back of the Explorer, Dave. Process him for me, public intoxication or something. I gotta make the rounds before they do the business with the key.”
Without waiting for Dave to think it over, Danny headed into the glass closet that served as her office, dropped the blinds, and did her best to rearrange her uniform so she looked a little less like the Wolfman herself.
The back room of the station contained almost everything police-related. An evidence locker with a padlock on it. The communications desk with its radio, switchboard, and the walkie-talkie charging station. A couple of desks for whoever needed to do paperwork or take a statement. There was also Danny’s tiny glass-walled office, a conference table, a gun cabinet with an impressive arsenal, mostly impounded. And at the back by the outside door, a pair of cells, complete with old-fashioned iron-barred doors.
It was a trim little operation, as long as nothing went too wrong.
Danny emerged from her office as tidied up as she was going to get. Dave was half-carrying Wulf through the door of the nearest cell, grimacing as the old man’s smell was transferred onto himself. Wulf was complaining in a singsong murmur, but offered no resistance.
Danny passed through to the front room of the station, emerging behind the glass partition that spanned the space, a legacy of the Post Office days. A high countertop was let into the middle of the glass for dealing with the public. Danny unlocked the partition door and stepped into the waiting area. Beyond it were a couple of old plastic loveseats, a rest room, and a potted plant that Danny had assumed was artificial for the first four months she worked at the station, until she saw Deputy Ted watering it. On the public side of the partition were taped-up official notices, FBI Most Wanted lists, and government information posters. Some of the posters had become outright bizarre since the federal government began its “Secrecy Is Strength” campaign: The latest one featured an extreme close-up of an American eagle’s eye and the motto “Help Us Watch Over You.”
Outside the plate glass front wall of the station, a growing crowd of out-of-towners was moving down Main Street. Looked like the usual mix of families and retirees, working class mostly, with a few upscale seekers of quaint Americana mixed in. Not many teenagers, Danny was pleased to note. Her head still felt foul although she’d swallowed a couple of Advil tablets from the bottle in her desk drawer. She probably needed to eat something. The Wooden Spoon was right across the way, but the thought of the usual fried egg breakfast sandwich was nauseating.
And Christ, another thing had slipped her mind: the chili contest. In a couple of hours—she checked her watch: three hours, at
twelve-thirty—the chili cookoff would begin, and as recipient of the Key to the Mountains, Danny was expected to be the official third judge on the tasting panel. The permanent judges were Gordy Morton, who ran the True Value hardware store, and Eleanor Dennison of the Junque Shoppe. The thought of watching the three-hundred-pound Gordy Morton eating cup after cup of chili was enough to make Danny’s stomach juke left.
She swallowed hard and stepped outside into the gathering warmth of Main Street, her eyes stung by the crisp sunlight and her ears set ringing by the bleating of the Skyline High Marching Brass Band. They were belting out the theme from Rocky, more or less. I’d be better off dead, if this keeps up, Danny thought.
Inside the Wooden Spoon, Weaver Sampson and Patrick Michaels watched through the window as the sheriff of Forest Peak emerged squinting into the sunlight. They had the two-seat window table. It was Weaver’s RV, The White Whale, that was illegally parked in the gymnasium lot, not far from the bandstand at the far end of Main Street upon which the Skyline High Marching Brass Band was sacrificing musical goats. Patrick observed Weaver’s eyes as they followed the sheriff on her way down the sidewalk.
“It’s the heat,” Patrick said.
Weaver grunted. He had an eloquent range of grunts, being a man of few words. It was one of the things Weaver did that kept Patrick guessing. Weaver looked like one of those rugged, lean men in the old photographs who built the Hoover Dam and the Chrysler Building; he had that silent sufficiency about him, in direct opposition to Patrick’s incessant babbling and complaining.