Montgomery doesn’t look at him, his eyes fixed on a tree some distance from the truck. “No,” he says.
Sam holds back a smile. “You got any dinner plans?”
“Nope.”
“I could go for a cheeseburger and a cold beer.”
Montgomery smokes, the brim of his hat casting a shadow over his face. “I could take you to the Kirkland Steakhouse. But it’s south of here, about ten minutes if you drive slower than I do.”
Sam grins this time. “How long does it take you?”
“From the town center, probably five.”
“That’s not bad.”
Montgomery collapses onto his back, holding his cigarette above him against the side of the truck. He closes his eyes, then opens them again and looks up. It’s starting to get dark now, the pinks and purples gone. “Does the rest of the sheriff’s department know you’ve been talking to me?” he says.
“No,” says Sam. “Why?”
“No reason.”
Montgomery lies there for a minute, then sticks his cigarette in his mouth and swings over the side of the truck. He has to round the back to the driver’s door, and when he reaches the tail end, Sam says,
“What are you going to do when you get tired of Skull Valley?”
Montgomery freezes, looking at him with the cigarette in his lips and the wings of his cowboy hat touching the sky. “Hell, I don’t know. Why do you ask so many questions? Get outta there, unless you want to ride in the back all the way down.”
Sam climbs out of the truck bed and gets into the cab.
It’s dark by the time they reach the highway.
CHAPTER SIX
He’s in the diner again, a gun pointed at his chest, the flat surfaces of the room glaring white and the chrome edges glinting in his peripheral vision. This time, it’s Joel Troutman aiming at him and he’s got a rifle, not a handgun. He isn’t wearing a sock mask; Sam’s looking right at him, at his face and his eyes clear as the Arizona sky without a cloud in sight.
“You can go,” Sam tells him, his hands up in front of him. “I’m not going to chase you.”
Troutman watches him with a strange lack of urgency. There’s no bag of money, just him and his hunting rifle, the end of the barrel close enough that Sam could grab it if he wanted. He’s no expert on firearms, but he knows that if Troutman shoots him with that thing at point blank range, it’s over.
“I won’t come after you, I promise. You can walk out of here, get in your vehicle, and leave town. All right?”
“I don’t know about that, Deputy,” another man says.
Sam immediately recognizes the voice.
Montgomery’s standing off to his right, in the aisle between booths adjacent to Sam, just where he was the first night they met. But he’s not armed now. He’s just standing there looking at Troutman, his face and body nonchalant but his gray eyes sharp like a pair of arrowheads.
Troutman swings his gun away from Sam in a sweeping arc, aiming for Montgomery.
“Don’t!” Sam says.
Troutman pulls the trigger. The force of the blast knocks Montgomery to the floor and sends him skidding across a couple feet of black and white linoleum tile. He lies motionless, his limbs catching up with the rest of his body as they sway and collapse.
Troutman turns and runs, the bell on the door jingling as he disappears into the night.
Sam slides to his knees at Montgomery’s side, mouth hanging open as he looks at the other man.
Montgomery’s eyes are open but blank, fixed on the ceiling. There’s a gaping hole in his chest, his shirt in tatters, dark blood splattered all over him and beginning to pool on the floor. Sam doesn’t know what to do.
“Montgomery?” he says, voice small. “Montgomery?”
He doesn’t get an answer.
Sam’s hands hover and move in the air, stretched out but unsure where to touch the body. Perhaps unwilling, like if he doesn’t make contact, the mirage will dissolve and Montgomery will walk out of the restroom alive and well. But he blinks and the image doesn’t change. The bottom starts to drop out of his stomach, and his eyes well as his hands land on Montgomery’s face. The cheeks are still warm, skin tan from working in the sun, stubble like sandpaper against Sam’s palms. His thumbs swipe back and forth like windshield wipers over Montgomery’s face, and he picks up the heavy head off the floor just a little. The eyes don’t track, vacant.
A pair of tears rolls down Sam’s face. He sits with Montgomery’s head in his lap to wait for the sirens and the lights, hands never leaving the false warmth of the face. The smoke has cleared, but the air still smells like it’s burning.
Sam sucks in a breath as he wakes up, alone in his bedroom. The bluish light of early morning filters through the window, leaving most of the room in soft darkness. He looks at the digital clock on his night table and finds he still has thirty minutes before the alarm goes off. He takes a deep breath and closes his eyes, then opens them again on the ceiling. The fear from his dream is already evaporating, replaced with relief, but the image of Montgomery dead stays vivid in his mind.
An hour and a half later, he’s stepping into Prescott’s Lone Spur Cafe dressed in his uniform. He scans the room until he finds the back of a man’s head poking up from a booth, shoulder length black hair tied in a ponytail at the nape of his neck. He beelines for the man and slides into the empty seat opposite him.
“Morning, Jethro,” Sam says.
“Good morning, Deputy Roswell,” says Jethro, looking down into his coffee. He lifts the white mug to his lips and his dark eyes rise with it, meeting Sam’s gaze as he drinks.
Jethro Beauty is a Yavapai Indian. The Yavapai people are split amongst three different reservations in Arizona, one of them right next to Prescott on a mere fourteen hundred acres of land. The Yavapai-Prescott tribe is fewer than two hundred people, most of whom work for the tribe’s two casinos, hotel, business park, and the big shopping center leased to white companies serving the town of Prescott. Beauty is chief of the tribal police force, which has only seven other officers, and owns a smoke shop in the Frontier Village shopping center. He and his wife have a few acres of the rez all to themselves. She keeps chickens, and they own a pair of dogs. Their son, an only child, lives in Portland, Oregon. Jethro’s first cousin Arthur Whipple is the chief of their tribe.
The lieutenant of North Area Command, Sam’s supervising officer at the station in Prescott, introduced Sam to Jethro Beauty as necessary procedure, during Sam’s first week on the force. On account of Sam being a new resident of the area and completely unfamiliar with the land and the boundaries separating Yavapai jurisdiction from the sheriff’s, Beauty took him on a tour of the rez. They’ve been meeting once a week for breakfast or lunch ever since—though Sam still isn’t sure if they’re friends or just two men in the same profession sharing meals.
Sam pulls one of the menus tucked against the wall of the booth behind the chrome napkin dispenser and begins to skim it, as Jethro sits across from him with one hand still curled around the handle of his mug and stares at Sam. Their waitress stops by to fill Sam’s water glass and asks him what else he wants to drink. He orders coffee. She comes back a minute later with another white mug. Sam adds creamer, looking at Jethro again.
“Something on your mind?” Jethro says, his voice deep and gravelly.
Sam doesn’t answer at first, lifting his mug to his lips and blowing on the coffee before taking a test sip. It’s still too hot and he sets the mug down again. “Do you believe in prophetic dreams?” he says.
“Depends on who’s dreaming.”
Sam pauses again and scans down one column of his menu.
Even this early on a Tuesday, the Lone Spur Cafe is almost full, smells of bacon, sausage, and maple syrup in the air. It’s a small restaurant in the heart of Downtown, popular with locals and tourists for its atmosphere as much as its food. The walls are decorated with antique metal spurs and cowboy tools used in the Old West, horseshoes, mini
ng pans, framed paintings of cowboys on horseback, a few mounted rifles, a glass case showcasing sheriff stars, a real bear skin, an antelope head, and a stag skull. Deer antler chandeliers hang over the booths, and in the cafe foyer, a buffalo head mounted on the wall greets customers, wearing a white cowboy hat. Wooden wagon wheels and donated cowboy boots sit atop the separating wall between the foyer and dining room. In one section of the cafe, dozens of real cowboy spurs, metal stirrups, and other parts hang from the wooden rafters above a row of booths. The place reminds Sam of Montgomery now.
“You got any thoughts on friendship, Jethro?” Sam says.
Jethro continues to look at him with an inscrutable expression. He blinks, drinks his coffee, and doesn’t speak for a minute or two.
Sam decides what he wants to eat, as he waits for a response.
“It is a broad subject,” Jethro says. He thinks some more. “The happiest men I’ve known either had a good wife or at least one good friend. It is rare to have both, common to have neither. I think one is much harder to find than the other.”
“Which one?” says Sam.
“Which do you think?”
The waitress returns to take the men’s orders. Jethro always has the same thing when Sam meets him here for breakfast: Joe’s Special. Today, Sam wants two eggs over easy, hash browns, and a biscuit with butter, no gravy.
“You ever have a good friend?” Sam asks, sipping coffee from his mug.
Jethro glances at him, then looks past Sam’s right shoulder toward the back of the cafe. “I have had a few,” he says. “My brother, James. My cousin, the chief. Outside of my family, Peter Hazelwood was the best friend I ever had. Fellow Yavapai. We met when we were boys.”
Sam’s never heard of the man, and he would’ve by now, if Peter Hazelwood was still a resident of the area. “What happened to him?”
“Vietnam.” Jethro lifts his mug to his lips and takes a drink. His face, his eyes, and his voice don’t give anything away, but the word hanging between him and Sam unexplained is enough to make it clear that forty odd years hasn’t cured the pain of Jethro’s loss. He’s in his mid-sixties now, which would’ve made him and his friend young men in their early twenties during the tail end of the war. Sam has a feeling that Jethro can still remember Peter’s face with perfect clarity. He’s almost sorry he asked.
“And you, Deputy Roswell? Have you had better luck with friendship than marriage?”
Sam half shakes his head and shrugs his shoulders a little.
Jethro leans back into his cushioned seat, pose more relaxed. “You’re still young,” he says. “You have time.”
“I don’t think time has much to do with it,” Sam says. “Seems like it’s mostly about luck.”
“You have a lot of time to get lucky.”
Sam doesn’t quite smile and looks down into his coffee. He wonders what Jethro would think of Montgomery. He tries to picture the two men meeting, and he gets the sense that they would like each other in a mutually silent and unenthusiastic way.
“You left no one behind in California worth counting?” says Jethro, looking at Sam now. It’s the kind of question that he already knows the answer to but he asks it out of courtesy to the other person.
“If there was someone there worth sticking around for, I would’ve stayed,” Sam says.
Jethro nods.
Sam’s thought about tracking down the best friends of his youth, since moving to Prescott, but trying to revive old relationships over long distance doesn’t feel like the solution he’s looking for. He’s been spending more time with Montgomery, and he’s hoping that the aloof and enigmatic cowboy is the man he needs. But he can’t be sure yet. He’s still not convinced that Montgomery wants to be friends with him. It could just be that he’s politely indulging Sam.
The waitress serves Sam and Jethro their food, and they eat in silence for a while.
“The man wanted for robbing the Dog Bowl Diner is still at large,” Jethro says, moving food around on his plate with his fork.
“Yes,” says Sam.
“Is the Sheriff’s Department still actively pursuing him?”
“As far as I know.”
Jethro is quiet.
“What?” Sam says.
“Enough time has passed that if you haven’t found him, you probably never will.”
It’s true, so Sam doesn’t argue.
He’s thought plenty about Joel Troutman in the weeks since the hold-up, usually when he’s driving or when he looks out his kitchen window at the mountains in the distance or when he sees Montgomery. Every time he’s watched the local news since the hold-up, he’s seen Troutman’s photo displayed with the Yavapai County Sherriff’s phone number, the anchor advising anyone with information on the suspect to call and leave a tip. He hears the locals in town gossiping about Troutman, the robbery, and Ed Decker’s death no less now than he did the first week after the incident, and even at work, the other deputies have the same conversations about the case over and over because it’s the most exciting thing that’s happened in the county in recent memory. He’s made multiple visits to Dewey-Humboldt, and he sees the wanted flyers still posted in the gas stations, bars, and store windows when he’s down there. The Sheriff’s Department considered paying for a billboard along the highway leading into Dewey-Humboldt, but the cost was outside their budget.
“Did you get a wanted poster?” Sam asks. “With Troutman’s picture?”
Jethro glances up at him from his plate. “Yes,” he says.
“Do me a favor and keep your ear to the ground, especially when you’re off the rez?”
“No need to ask.”
They finish their food and their coffee, pay their tabs, and go their separate ways.
~~*
Montgomery drives Sam out to one of his favorite spots on the Barbee Ranch, in the cooling dusk of a Saturday night. They lie down in the grass with an ice cold six pack between them, pulled from the portable cooler in the truck bed, and watch as the smear of fiery orange light slowly shrinks into the mountains on the horizon and the stars begin to peep out of the darkening lavender sky. It’s getting colder at night now, and soon they won’t want to stay outside unless they have to. They’re both silent until they’ve finished drinking their first beers, looking at the landscape together and listening to the birds and the insects and the slightest breeze rustling the plants.
Montgomery cracks open his second beer and says, “So if Joel Troutman ever got found and arrested, what would ya’ll charge him with?”
Sam thinks about it, staring at the mountain range silhouetted against the sky now a dark indigo softened in the deepening darkness. “Aggravated assault and armed robbery, for sure. If they really wanted to go after him, they might try tacking on accessory to attempted murder of a police officer, but I doubt a prosecutor could sell that to a jury, when a bunch of witnesses can testify to the fact that he never threatened my welfare directly and tried to convince Decker to leave me alone.”
“How much time would he do for the assault and robbery charges?”
Sam blows air through his nose and says, “Hard to say. It depends on the judge. Could be less than five, could be ten or more.”
“The bottom line being, that no matter what, his wife’s shit out of luck. Bet you there was less than five hundred dollars in that sack Troutman made off with.”
Montgomery takes a drink, and Sam doesn’t reply.
“Anybody in the Sheriff’s Department consider the possibility that she might just run off with him?” Montgomery asks, after a pause.
Sam glances at him. “I don’t think she would. Even if Joel came back for her. They have a toddler. She isn’t going to become a fugitive and risk losing her son for Joel and a few hundred bucks.”
Montgomery doesn’t look convinced. “People do stupid things to get out of a bad spot.”
“Yeah,” Sam says. “But I’m pretty sure Willa Rae wouldn’t do something stupid for so little money and no guarantees. N
ot to mention, she made it clear to me that she doesn’t defend what Joel and Ed did.”
Montgomery pauses, sips on his beer, sits up with his knees in front of him and the beer can in the grass between his legs. He lights a cigarette, cupping one hand around the end as he does, then rests his arms on his knees and looks over the land. “You ever meet a truly bad man?” he says. “On the job, I mean. Someone who’d done something that’d make people afraid of him.”
Sam breaks a second can of beer out of the plastic rings and snaps it open. “I’ve met some people who broke the law in minor ways. But I don’t know about the kind of person you’re describing. We never had any murders in Lassen County, while I was there. Or child abuse. Rape. Even the domestic calls were all pretty tame.”
Montgomery quirks a corner of his mouth and takes a drag on his cigarette.
“What?” Sam says, catching the smile.
“Just because you never got any calls about murder, rape, and child abuse doesn’t mean they ain’t ever happened, Deputy.”
The suggestion unsettles Sam. “Rate of crime is always proportional to population. Lassen County is mostly rural with a small population spread out all over. Even in the county seat, where we were headquartered, violent crime has always been low. And there’s about eighteen thousand people in Susanville.”
“Low and nonexistent are two different things,” Montgomery says.
Sam doesn’t respond, and they’re quiet for a few minutes, drinking.
“Been meaning to ask you,” says Montgomery, as he lies back down with the cigarette hanging from his lips. He’s got his elbows underneath him. “If you’d had your gun that night in the diner, what do you think you would’ve done?”
Sam looks at him. He hadn’t thought about that hypothetical scenario at all, as strange as that may be. “I don’t know. I’m sure I would’ve pulled my weapon on Decker as soon as he snatched up the kid, but after that, it would’ve come down to his reaction.”
“Think you would’ve shot him?”
Sam hesitates. “It’s within my right as an officer of the law to shoot anyone who threatens my life or someone else’s. But it’s supposed to be my last resort.”
Lone Star on a Cowboy Heart Page 6