Cold Dish wl-1

by Craig Johnson

  “You know, I used to think I was pretty good at this relationship stuff…”

  She wiped her hands on her apron. “Oh, Walter.” She shook her head. “You know she’s had a rough life.”

  “Yep, I know. She’s having a rough time buying the White Mountains in Arizona right now.” The food, as always, tasted marvelous. Maybe when I was unemployed, I could work part time for Dorothy. She was still looking at me, and I had the feeling I was going to have to go seek employment elsewhere. “What?”

  “When her father killed himself ”-she had placed the pitcher on the counter, anticipating another fill-“there were some things going on out there.” The hazel eyes stayed steady under a salt-and-pepper lock.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She shrugged. “Just talk. I don’t think her marriage was very happy, either.” She looked down at my rapidly vanishing meal. “How’s the food?”

  I stopped chewing long enough to reply, “Marry me?”

  “That good, huh?”

  I looked up to check, but there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The wind was still kicking up, so I figured the snowflakes that kept waltzing around my head must have just hitched a ride; their changing patterns reminded me of the mountain in an unsettling fashion. I thought about the visions I had been having and chalked them up to strain and just plain fatigue.

  Turk was sitting in one of the reception chairs and stood when I came in. Ruby was seated at her desk with her lunch of a watercress sandwich on low-fat seven-grain bread, carrots, and a sliced apple unfolded before her, which looked fresh, healthy, and completely unappetizing. “What’s up?”

  He glanced over at Ruby, who was watching him. “Could I speak with you, Sheriff?” His voice was still nasal with the muffling of the packing and bandages.

  “Yeah, sure. You wanna talk in my office?” He nodded and followed me in. I sat at my desk and gestured for him to have a seat. He shook his head and continued standing. He looked like nine kinds of hell; the bruising around his eyes had spread as far back as his side-burns, and it hurt to look at him. “What can I do for you?”

  “Uncle Lucian says this is a bad time to have this conversation with you, but I thought you ought to know about my intentions? I put my application in with the Highway Patrol.”

  I had to laugh; I couldn’t even keep a hold of Turk. “Really?”

  “Yes, sir.” He twitched his face to stop an itch I was sure he was going to have for a while. “Uncle Lucian said it might be for the best.”

  I nodded and crossed my arms. “He’s a smart fella, that one-legged bandit uncle of yours.”

  “Yes, sir.” He looked back up at me. “He also said that if I ever ran for sheriff, you’d just run against me, win and serve a half a term, and then step down, giving her two years to prove herself.”

  “He’s right, I would.” Pretty soon I’d be running the place by myself. “He say anything else?”

  I thought I saw just a glimmer of a smile at the corner of his mouth from underneath the droop of his mustache but, with the bandages, it was hard to tell. “He said that masturbation is a wonderful form of stress relief in the workplace and that the wildflowers are beautiful along I-80 in the spring.”

  I stuck a peeling hand out to him. He looked at it, then to me. I’m sure we were a handsome pair, him with his nose and me with my hands and ear. “I won’t give you a bad letter of recommendation.”

  He took my hand, hesitantly. “Thanks.”

  I knew the colonel down in Cheyenne, and he owed me a few favors. “I’ll make some phone calls.”

  He shook my hand a little more and then released it. “You really do want to get rid of me.”

  “Let’s just say I think it might be a better fit.” I really did. The narrower limitations of vehicular law enforcement along with a more regimented style of department could be just what Turk needed. That or the colonel would never owe me another favor for as long as the state had paved roads.

  I looked past him and saw Vic appear in the doorway. She glanced at Turk when he turned to see what I was looking at. “Jesus, you look like shit.”

  He turned back to me before he left. “Good luck.” I had no idea he had a sense of humor. I could have asked him about his. 45–70, but it didn’t seem pertinent. It wasn’t him, and it wasn’t going to be.

  Vic sat in the chair opposite me, propping her feet onto my desk as usual, and arranging a sheath of papers in her lap. I sat back down. “Don’t play with your ear.”

  “Sorry.” I returned my hand to my lap. “Henry and Lucian are going even money on whether I’ll lose it. Ballistics?”

  She shuffled the papers. “Both leads match, which does not come as a great surprise, both contain the same chemical compound, and both are from the same slug batch, 30 to 1 ratio… Same shooter.”

  “How are your friends back in Washington?”

  She looked at me for a moment. “Quantico.”

  “Whatever.” I pulled out a pen, uncapped it, and underlined Jim Keller’s name. “I’ve always wondered why they haven’t tried to lure you back.”

  “There’s an opening with the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crimes Services in the Criminal Investigative Analysis Unit.”

  I nodded. “Do you have to say all that every time you answer the phone?”

  “There’s also an opening in West Virginia at the FBI Fingerprint Analysis Lab, and there’s always Philadelphia.”

  I exhaled slowly. “Well, I didn’t think we were going to be able to keep you forever.”

  She looked up from the papers then returned to them, and it was very quiet for a while. “We ran a check on Roger Russell’s gun…”

  “I didn’t even know you had it.”

  She looked back up, allowing her head to drop to one side in dismissal. “Somebody’s gotta run the place while you’re out traipsing around in the woods.”

  “And…?”

  “Doesn’t match. And we got a call back from the Buffalo Bill Museum. They did acquire a Sharps. 45–70 from Artie Small Song more than a year ago.”

  I shrugged. “Artie has also been locked up in the Yellowstone County jail since Saturday.”

  She made a big show of pulling a pencil from behind her ear and scratching through his name on her papers. “Jim Keller?”

  “Nothing.” I put the cap back on the pen and tossed it onto the blotter. “Which brings us to the Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead.”

  She looked at her notes. “No match, but it’s been fired numerous times. Like a box of shells.”

  “Twenty rounds?” She nodded her head. “When?”

  “Just over a week ago.”

  “Right before the murders?”

  “Have you ever looked down the barrel of one of those things after they’ve been shot?”

  I thought back to Omar’s. “Yep, once.”

  “They lead up real bad. You throw twenty rounds through one of those things without cleaning it, you’re looking to get it blown up in your face.” Her hands rested on her lap. “I looked down the barrel, and you could hardly see daylight.”

  My ear itched, but I figured it was a good sign. “So why would somebody do that?”

  “Practice?” We looked at each other.

  “That lets your friend Henry off. He doesn’t need practice.”

  I leaned back in my chair. “When we were up on the mountain, he took the shotgun and gave me the rifle. He said something about not being as good a shot as me.” I stood up. “I better go get that damn thing out of my truck and bring it in here. It turns up missing, I’m gonna be even more cursed than I am now.”

  “It’s still in your truck?”

  I started around the desk and looked down at the top of her head as she studied her notes. “I forgot about it.” She shook her head, and I reached over and touched her shoulder. “By the way, thanks for the shells.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “That old box of shells in my truck, the
ones that look about a hundred and fifty years old?” She didn’t move, but the tarnished gold came up slow. “Please tell me you left an aged box of. 45–70 ammunition on the seat of my truck?” I waited. “Next to the rifle?”

  She didn’t say anything, just sat there looking at me. I think she was checking to see if I was really there. I wasn’t sure myself.

  15

  When we got to the truck, I was relieved to look through the passenger side window and see the cartridge box there. I was beginning to think that I was having some sort of mental breakdown and that the box lying beside the rifle on my seat was another phantom apparition. “Do you see that box on the seat?”

  She peeked past my shoulder and turned her face to look at me. “What box?”

  I nodded my head, ever so slightly. “Very funny.” I unlocked the door and opened it; the barrel of the Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead was pointed directly at us. The box was on the seat in the exact spot where I had placed it after my brief examination. Using the inside liner of the pocket of my jacket, I reached in and showed it to Vic. “Was this in here when you put the rifle on the seat and locked the truck?”

  “No.”

  I looked at the box. “Anybody drive my truck while I was gone?”

  “Nobody. Did you leave your keys?”

  “On the rack, in case somebody had to move it.”

  “This is getting exciting.”

  I placed the small cardboard container on my desk along with the rifle and sat in my chair as Vic leaned against the desk with her thighs flattened on the edge and her arms crossed. We were both looking at the damn thing like it might jump up, do back flips, and run away. It was a battered little box with the corners dented in and the edges fuzzy. The black printing was faded and scuffed, but you could still make it out. The print was in assorted fonts and at least as ornate as the handwritten addition. There was a floral pattern and a series of lines on each side that encapsulated the words “This Box Contains 20 Metallic Cartridges, Manufactured by Sharps’ Rifle Mf ’g Co., Hart-ford, Conn.” There was a large hole, exactly the size of a. 45 caliber slightly low and left of center with “400 yards” scribbled in pencil beside it. The writing was old, with a flourishing hand and detailed penmanship. It looked like the writing in the old sheriff’s logbook. There was something familiar about it and, if the distance was true, it was scary shooting.

  When I looked up again, Vic was staring at me. “Well, are we waiting till Christmas?”

  I took two pens from my broken Denver Broncos mug and carefully held the box down with one and worked the flap open with the other. No sense in getting even more fingerprints on the thing. I slumped a little and rested my chin on my arm as I continued to look in the box. “If you were cartridges over a hundred years old, wouldn’t you be tarnished?”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re not.”

  She leaned around the corner and peered into the box like something might come out. “Look like they were loaded yesterday.”

  I flattened one of the pens on the cardboard divider and slowly coaxed the box back, allowing two of the cartridges to roll out onto the blotter; they were both empties that had been fired. I spun one of the cartridges around with the pen so I could see the indentation at the primer. I turned the other one, and it was identical. “Two down.” I pinned the divider to the blotter again and nudged the box back, allowing two more shells to roll out. These were live, with lead and primers intact, as were those in the rest of the box. “Does it worry you that there are two of these shells spent?”

  “You mean how it matches up with our current body count?”

  “Something like that.” I looked along the shiny lines of reflection on the surface of the casing nearest me and clearly made out discolored spots whirling in the pattern of fingerprints. Whoever had handled these cartridges had not done it with any great care and, as I glanced at the other shells, I began to see more prints. With my luck, the individual who made them had been dead for seventy years. “Do you still have that shell of Omar’s that I gave you?”

  “Yeah.” She retreated into her office and returned with the cartridge. While she was gone, I flipped the box over. On the other side was another hole where the shot had passed through: impressive to the point of being mythic. I looked at the handwriting and was sure I had seen it before. When she returned and handed Omar’s bullet to me, she leaned over to peruse the shells on the blotter. “These are different.”

  His shell had a rounded line at the butt end that ended with two small stars and writing on the other side of the primer that read. 45–70 GOVT.; on the mystery shells, there was nothing. The edges at the butt plate weren’t as sharp either, as if the machining had been done in a hurry with devices under pressure to produce in difficult times. I scooped up one of the spent shells at the open end with the tip of the pen and held it up to my nose and sniffed. There was no quartzite, but traces of black powder were evident.

  “They are originals.” I wasn’t surprised when the baritone rumble of his voice interrupted our conversation. I had seen Henry walk up and lean against the doorway, but Vic hadn’t, and it was just a tiny bit amusing when her back stiffened.

  “What’re you doing out of the hospital?”

  He crossed over and eased himself into the chair opposite my desk. “I see you still have your ear.”

  I laid the cartridge down on the blotter and tossed the pen back in the mug. “Yep, I’ve removed all the scissors from the office, and I’m just not going to take any naps when Lucian’s around.” I nodded toward the scattered shells on my desk. “What do you know about these?”

  Vic refolded her arms and looked at him, and her glance seemed to carry a little more professional interest than I would have found comforting. Henry simply smiled at her. “Hi.”

  She smiled back. “Hi.”

  I looked at the two of them for a moment. “Okay, before the two of you get into a pissing contest, how about you tell me what you know about these?”

  His eyes continued smiling at Vic for longer than they should have, then he turned to me. “Where did you get them?”

  “They were on the seat of my locked truck this morning, alongside the rifle.”

  “Interesting.” He waited a moment. “They are originals.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I am the one who polished and reloaded them, but I did not reload them for myself.” He took a deep breath and exhaled it slowly as he turned his head toward the window. “Lonnie.” After looking up at Vic, I turned back to him and waited. “Lonnie said that he wanted to shoot the rifle, and I was concerned that he might run some of those hot, modern cowboy loads through it. I took forty of the original cartridges he had and hand loaded them so they wouldn’t damage the rifle.”

  I sighed and raised my eyes up to Vic. “Get a preliminary on these shells, then ship samples down to DCI.” She nodded, and I stood. “How far do you think you can get, within our obvious technical limitations?”

  “Pretty damn far.” She looked at me as I scooped up the rifle. “Where are you going?”

  I glanced over at Henry who was studying me. “I’m going out to talk with Lonnie Little Bird and get some fingerprints.”

  “You sure you don’t want somebody to go with you?”

  I looked back at him. “I got somebody.”

  The heat of the day had begun to melt away what remained of the snow, and the clouds were just beginning to break up in the face of a mild, Wyoming autumn afternoon. As we drove out of town, I looked in the rearview mirror at the Bighorns. The fresh coat of snow had done them some good, even if it hadn’t done either of us any. We rode along in silence. My sheepskin jacket was draped over Henry’s shoulders; Dena Many Camps had forgotten to bring him a coat along with his fresh clothes. He didn’t particularly look irritated, just preoccupied, so I left him alone with his thoughts. I had picked up a fingerprint kit from our minilab and informed Ruby where we were going, asking her to relay any information gotten fro
m Dave at the Sportshop, from the Espers, or Jim Keller. Lucian was still in the back asleep, and I told her to wake him up if anything happened. She had looked at me and withheld comment.

  There was one question on my mind, and it concerned a box of aged. 45–70 shells that had been left on my truck seat. I broke the silence by asking, “Why did he leave them?”

  “I do not know.” He didn’t turn but slouched a little against the door, the Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead leaning gently against the inside of one of his knees. “Unless it was good fortune.”

  “For whom?”

  “You.” He still looked out the windshield at the sunny afternoon. “Lonnie has grown very fond of you over the last few years. The last time we were there? He asked me if it would be all right if he gave this rifle to you.”

  “The Cheyenne Rifle of the Dead? Thanks a lot, but no thanks.” He rode along quietly, and I was pretty sure I had hurt his feelings. “If it’s all the same with you and Lonnie, I think I’ll just hang around here in the camp of the living for a while.”

  “That is not why he wanted to give it to you.” He turned and looked at me for the first time. “He wanted to give it to you to shield you.”

  “From what?”

  He shrugged and looked back out the windshield. “He said that you need protection from something very powerful and very bad.” The rest he spoke in a monotone. “He said that you are a good man and that there are those who would assist you if they could. That they had spoken with him, and that if you would allow them, they would help you.”

  “Help me what?”

  He sat there for a while, and I was getting worried that he might have left the hospital a little prematurely when he spoke. “Live.”

  As we passed the cutoff to the Powder River Road, I thought about what Vonnie had said, that she had assembled herself so that she didn’t have to deal with all the things I had suddenly reintroduced into her life. I thought about caring about somebody more than life itself. As I looked back, I was pretty sure that Martha hadn’t loved me that much. She had been fond of me but had settled for me and had made the best of her situation. She had stayed because of Cady, and I had stayed because I loved Cady that much. I simply couldn’t conceive of doing anything else. I figured what I’d do was go over to Vonnie’s tonight and have a long talk with her. Maybe we could put things off until this case was over. The time when I had held her long toes, fitting the high arches of her feet in the palms of my hands, and had driven her home in the dark of the night seemed very far away and receding.