“Good gravy.” I waited as he handed me the coffee cup and took another bite. “I just don’t want to cause no trouble.”
“We’re talkin’ legal trouble, and that ain’t nothin’ compared to the trouble that piece of shit’s gonna have when I lay hands on him next.”
His eyes stayed steady, and his voice took on a patriarchal tone. “Now, Walt… don’t you hurt that boy.” I straightened up in indignation. Here was a battered man lying in my jail who hadn’t even been allowed to clean himself up after having been beaten. I was about as angry as I could remember being. “Hell, I peed all over him…” His smile broadened at the thought of it. “Then I peed all over the back of his fancy car.”
I tried to keep a straight face, but the thought of anybody peeing all over the back of the Thunder Chicken brought joy to my heart. I thought of all the decals with little characters pissing on each other in Turk’s back window. It seemed like he should have a better sense of humor about such things. I chuckled along with Jules, in spite of myself.
“I think I got’m again before he put me in here.”
“The floor did seem a little sticky on the way in, Jules.” We laughed some more. “But I think you ought to press charges.” Between bites, he reached for his coffee and replied.
“Stop it, yer ruinin’ my breakfast.”
By the time I got down the hallway from the jail, my anger had subsided into a calculated ember. As I attempted to storm into my office, Ruby called out, “Vern Selby on line one.”
I was at her desk before we both knew it. “What?”
She stiffened a little, and her eyes widened. “Vern Selby…”
Before she could say anything else, I slapped the receiver from her phone as she fumbled and punched line one, and I yelled at the circuit court judge on the other end, “What?”
After a pause, “Walt, it’s Vern.”
“Yep?”
“I just called to remind you about the court appearance you’ve got Wednesday and see if you wanted to have lunch?”
“Yep.”
Another pause. “Yep yep or yep no?”
“Yep. I’ll have lunch, goddamn it.”
Yet another pause. “Well, I know Kyle Straub is looking for you. He was wondering if you had come up with anything on that Cody Pritchard thing?”
I vented out a low burst of steam. “No, I haven’t interviewed all the butlers.”
The longest pause yet. “Well, I know Kyle wanted to catch up with you, but I think I’ll tell him to go find something else to do today.”
“That’d be wise.” Ruby was not looking at me as I slammed the phone down on her desk. “Omar?”
“The airport at four o’clock; he’s picking up hunters.” The thank-you was all I could get out. “At the risk of having my head bit off, is there anything I can do?” She was one in a million.
“Get the big first-aid kit and give it to Jules so he can get himself cleaned up. If he wants to sleep, let him. The door’s open back there. If he wants lunch, get it for him. I’ll be back later to give him a ride home… Do me a favor?” She smiled, and I was starting to feel better. “Call up the Espers…” The smile soured a little.
“As in Jacob and George?”
“Yes, and the Kellers at the 3K.”
“Something I should know about?”
“I hope not. I’m just checking to see if they had any contact with Cody before he bought the proverbial farm.” This thank-you was easier.
I took the drive down to Swayback Road to cool off. Along with my better judgment, I took the exit and drove up toward Crazy Woman Canyon past the two fishing reservoirs, Muddy Guard One and Muddy Guard Two. Ah, the colorful contrasts of the Wild West. I spent twenty minutes crawling all over a patched-together ’48 Studebaker pickup trying to find a vehicle identification number that matched any of the ones on paper. After the third number, Mr. Fletcher and I were losing interest, and we settled on the first one, as it was the most legible.
When I got back to town, Ruby informed me that Jules had wandered off. She had spoken with Jim Keller and asked him to bring in Bryan. She had left a message on the answering machine at the Espers and, as of yet, had received no reply. “What time do you want them in here?”
I thought about Omar and the airport, Ernie Brown and the newspaper, and Vern Selby and the courthouse. “Oh, how about five? And call the Espers again; I’d just as soon get this all over with in one shot.”
“Bad choice of words.” She reached for the phone and hit redial.
I walked over to the courthouse and in the back door by the public library. Our courthouse was one of the first built in the territory, which gave the exterior a look of steadfast permanence. The inside, on the other hand, was steadfastly seedy after suffering the indignities of numerous remodelings. Cheap interior paneling, acoustic-tile ceilings, and threadbare green carpeting stretched as far as the fluorescent-lit eye could see. I called it the outhouse of sighs. Vern’s office was on the second floor and, as I swung around the missing newel post and trudged up the steps, I waved at the blue-haired ladies in the assessor’s office down the hall.
I sat on one of Vern’s chairs and waited for him to get off the phone. He was a precise older man, about seventy, who had wispy locks of silver hair that looked like Cecil B. DeMille had stirred them. He was just the kind of person you wanted to look up in the courtroom and see: patrician, calm, and even noble. The fact that he made life and death decisions on peoples’ lives was only slightly diminished by the fact that he never knew what day of the week it was. “Isn’t it Tuesday?”
“Monday, Vern.”
“I guess I lost a day in there somewhere.”
I wondered where, between Sunday and Monday, he had lost it.
He rested his elbows on the desk and carefully placed his chin on his clasped fists. “This Pritchard boy…”
I leaned back in the chair. “Haven’t you heard? That’s not a problem anymore.”
The Norwegian eyes blinked. “I’m thinking that the problems are just beginning.”
I spread my hands. “You know something I don’t?”
No blink. “I’m simply thinking that this unfortunate occurrence may exacerbate some of the hard feelings that resulted from the Little Bird rape case.”
“Exacerbate. Is that a double-word score?” I yawned and relaxed farther into the chair. “And what would you like me to do about this exacerbation?”
Still steady. “Is there any chance of a quick resolution to this situation?”
“I could plead guilty and arrest myself.”
He leaned back in his own chair, and I listened to the soft hiss as the air escaped from the leather padding. My chair didn’t have any padding. I was exacerbated. “Walter, I am sure I do not have to warn you that this case has all the earmarks of blowing up in our faces.” He rested his fingertips on the edge of the desk and sighed. “It was a high-profile case, and there are still a lot of tender feelings both on and off the reservation.” He paused a moment. “Why are you making this difficult for me?”
I slumped a little farther in my chair. “I’m having a bad day.”
“I gathered as much. Does it have to do with the case?”
I shook my head. “Not really.”
“Well, perhaps we should tackle one problem at a time. You’ve talked to the girl’s family?”
I leveled a good look at him. “You aren’t telling me how to do my job, are you Vern?” He raised his hands in surrender. We looked at each other for a while. “Lonnie Little Bird is a diabetic and had both legs amputated. I figure that moves him pretty far down the list of suspects.” We looked at each other some more. “He was the one that sat in the aisle in the wheelchair during the rape trial.”
He shook his head slightly and dismissed me with a wave. “We’ll talk on Wednesday.”
As I left, I cleared the air. “That’d be the Wednesday after tomorrow, Vern?”
It was getting close to four, so I drove up to the
airport. I figured Omar would be early; he always was. The local airport was famous for the Jet Festival, which celebrated an event that had taken place back in the early eighties when a Western Airlines 737 had mistaken our airport for Sheridan’s and had slid that big son of a gun to a record-breaking stop in only forty-five hundred feet. The town celebrated the avionic miracle by throwing a big party. They invited the pilot, Edger Lowell, every year. Every year, he declined. We never were made a hub, but we still got our share of polo players, dudes, wealthy executives, and big game hunters. The polo players come because of the Equestrian Center; the dudes come to play cowboy for a couple of thousand a week; the executives, to escape a world they had helped create; and the big game hunters, they come for Omar. So far, none of them had gotten him, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying.
Omar was a local enigma, the big dog of outfitters along the Bighorns. You could run the entire length of the range along the mountains and ownership would concede seven names, one of which was Omar Rhoades. His ranch followed the north fork of Rock Creek at the top of the county, stretched from I-90 to the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area, and was about half the size of Rhode Island. He was originally from Indiana and had inherited the place from a rich uncle who had despised the rest of the family. Omar knew everything there was to know about hunting and firearms. His personal collection was known worldwide, and the number of international hunters he wooed as a clientele was legion. He had his own airport on the ranch, but after the FAA had curtailed the size of his landing strip, the hunters that arrived in larger aircraft landed here.
I pulled through the chain-link fence and parked alongside the control tower. Old concrete pads patched with asphalt stretched across the flat surface of the bluff, and a frayed windsock popped in the strong breeze. I walked past the white cinder block building, which proclaimed DURANT, WYOMING, ELEVATION 4954; I guess they felt compelled to put the state on there just in case somebody really got lost. I had a great affinity for the few old Lockheed PV-2s parked along the end of the runway that dwarfed the three Cessna 150s chained to the tarmac in front of the building. There were no contracts for the naked aluminum birds, and they sat there with their cowlings and nose cones becoming a flatter and flatter red. The Pratt and Whitney engines slowly seeped aviation grade oil on the concrete, and the Bureau of Forestry decals had begun to peel away. At the end of the building, I looked down the flight way and saw what I was looking for: George Armstrong Custer leaning against a custom crew cab.
To say that he looked like the General was partly slighting to Omar; Omar was better looking and, I’m sure, a head taller than Ol’ Goldilocks. A carefully battered silver-belly Stetson sloped off his head, and his arms were folded into a full-length Hudson blanket coat with a silver-coyote collar. The locals considered him to be quite the dandy, but I figured he just had style. We had gotten to know each other through a lengthy series of domestic disturbances. Omar and his wife Myra had attempted to kill each other in an escalating process of more than eight years that had started out with kitchen utensils and ended, as far as I was concerned, with a matching set of. 308s that had been a wedding gift from the uncle. They were both crack shots and incredibly lucky that they had missed; they could live neither with nor without each other. At the moment, they were living without, and things had become considerably quieter on Rock Creek. He always looked like he was asleep, and he never was.
“So, if a man wanted to kill an innocent animal around here, what would he do?”
“Move. There isn’t any such thing as an innocent animal, especially around here.”
I leaned against the shiny surface of the Chevrolet and wondered how he kept all his vehicles so clean. He probably had about twelve guys on the job. “Didn’t you watch the Walt Disney Hour on television?”
“I was more partial to Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. ” He yawned and tipped his hat back. His cobalt eyes squeezed the distance to the mountains, and you could almost hear the clicking of his internal scopes as they measured the yards and calculated the trajectory. “Anyway, the animal you’re looking for is about as far from innocent as you can get.”
I pulled the plastic bag from my coat and held it up in front of him. It looked like a Rorschach test in lead. “Which brings me to the point at hand.” His eyes shifted to the Ziploc, and he looked more like a lion than anything else.
He yawned again. “Somebody meant business.”
He held out a hand, and I dropped into it the most important piece of evidence in our case. He palmed it for a moment, bouncing it between the band of his gold-trimmed Rolex and the three turquoise rings on his right hand. Omar was ambidextrous. Style. “Soft?”
“30 to 1, lead to tin.”
“Anything else?”
“Some sort of foreign substance, SPG or Lyman’s Black Powder Gold.”
“Lubricant made specifically for black-powder cartridge shooting.”
“Black-powder cartridge?”
It was the first time he looked at me. “How many people have seen this?”
“Vic, T. J. Sherwin at DCI, Chemical Analysis at Justice, and Henry.”
He blinked and continued to look at me. “The Bear didn’t know what this was?”
I paused. “We figured it was an antique shotgun slug, black powder?”
“Hmm…” He could noncommittal hmm almost as good as me.
“Something?”
He handed me back the baggie and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I could tell you, but I’d rather show you.”
“You’re that sure?”
He looked at the pointed toes of his handmade, belly-cut, alligator-skin Paul Bond boots. “I’m that sure.”
I ran through the rest of my day. “After 5:30?”
He looked again to the sky above Cloud Peak. “Tomorrow morning would be better, Sheriff. I’ve got a business to run.”
“What time?”
“Doesn’t matter, I’m always up.”
By the time I got back to the office, a green Dodge with a flat bed and fifth wheel was pulled up to the building, and the woman in the front seat made a point of not seeing me as I went in. Barbara Keller did not believe her child was guilty and never would. I went in the office and motioned for the two men to follow me. “Get you fellas some coffee?” Jim Keller shook his head, and Bryan studied his hands. “You sure? It’s been brewing since about eight this morning. Should be about right.”
“How can we help you, Walt?” Of all the young men in the group, I had found it the hardest to believe that Bryan had been involved with the rape. I wasn’t sure if he had always looked so sad or if the look had just intensified since the trial. “Jim, you own that land out next to the BLM where Bob Barnes runs Mike Chatham’s sheep?”
“Yes.”
“That’s where we found Cody Pritchard.” I glanced at Bryan. “You didn’t have any contact with him in the last couple of weeks, did you?”
“He has not.” I turned to look at Jim. Jim in turn looked at Bryan, who in turn looked at his hands. “Have you?”
Bryan found his hands even more interesting. “No, sir.”
“Jim, your wife is looking a little upset out there in your outfit, maybe you ought to go check on her?”
He gave Bryan another look. “You tell this man anything he wants to know, and you better damn well tell him the truth.”
I let the directive settle till the front door quietly shut. Bryan Keller was a handsome kid with wide cheekbones, a strong chin, and a small, hooked scar at the jawline. He had taken life on, and life had kicked his ass. I looked at the young wreck and felt sad too. “Bryan?” The jolt was two staged, and his eyes briefly met with mine. “Did you have any contact with Cody?”
“No, sir.”
“None at all?”
“No, sir.”
I believed him. Shells don’t lie, mostly. I stretched and laced my fingers behind my head. “Have you had anything to do with him since the trial?”
“No, sir.”
&nb
sp; “Are you aware of any threats that might have been made toward him? Any enemies he might have had?” This got a brief exhale. “Other than the obvious?”
“I’d liked to have killed the son of a bitch.”
I couldn’t help but raise my eyebrows. “Really?”
His eyes darted back to his hands. “Is sayin’ that gonna get me into trouble?”
“No more than the rest of us.” I went out into the reception area and poured myself a cup of coffee. “You sure you won’t have some? It really isn’t that bad.” He said okay, probably because I asked him twice and he had been taught that if somebody asks you something twice you say yes, no matter what it is. It looked like a heated conversation going on in the truck out front, and I thought about my child. I don’t know how you get them to make right choices, how you keep them from ending up like the two-parent pileup that was sitting in my office.
I brought Bryan his coffee and sat down in the chair beside him, taking off my hat and tossing it onto the desk. My gun belt was digging into my side, but I was ignoring it. We were both ignoring it. I sipped my coffee. “Bryan… Just for the record, I don’t think you killed Cody Pritchard… As I recall, your statements and testimony indicated that you didn’t participate in the rape.”
“I didn’t.” His eyes welled up, and I wished I washed cars for a living.
“You were only convicted as an accessory, with suspended sentence.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, that’s a good thing.”
He took a sip of his coffee and made a face. “There are days when I just can’t stand it.” He was crying openly, and I watched the tears stripe his face and drip onto his shirt.
“Stand what?”
He wiped his face with the sleeve of his Carhartt. “People… the way they look at me… like I’m not worth shit.”
“Well, at the risk of sounding trite, I guess it’s up to you to prove them wrong.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Stop yes-sirring me.”
“Yes, sir.”
I bought shampoo on the way home. When I got there, the substructure of a porch ran the entire distance of the cabin. Six six-by-sixes stood unflinching in the growing wind, and the little red Jeep was gone.
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