Plains Crazy

by J. M. Hayes

  Chairman Wynn had heard enough. Mad Dog might be a nut case, but he owed his own life to that nut. Probably his son’s as well. He wasn’t going to allow a quest for profit on a wind farm to turn into a witch hunt. He opened his mouth to protest, but the door opened first and his son stuck his uniformed body through it and smiled.

  “You guys seen Mad Dog?” Wynn Junior asked.

  The supervisors shook their heads.

  “I was supposed to keep him here for Deputy Parker,” Junior continued, “only he seems to have slipped off. Oh, and did you hear about the pipe bomb here at the courthouse?”

  Jaws dropped. Before anybody could respond, the windows rattled with the sound of an explosion.

  “Lord,” the younger Wynn declared. “You don’t suppose that could be another one?”

  ***

  Slipping away from Wynn Some hadn’t been hard, though Mad Dog’s initial attempt to follow Deputy Parker through the back door was blocked.

  “No siree Bob,” Deputy Wynn had told him. “Parker said to keep you here and that’s what I aim to do.”

  Mad Dog knew Wynn well enough not to argue. But he intended to make sure Hailey was all right. “Okay, then,” Mad Dog said. “I’ll go wait in the office with Mrs. Kraus while you keep Parker’s back covered.”

  Wynn had squared his shoulders and looked proud about securing Parker’s back. He’d continued to look proud clear to where Mad Dog exited the hall and could no longer see or be seen.

  The front doors were just across the foyer. After that, it was only a matter of ducking around the outside of the building. Mad Dog got there in time to see Parker work her way along a hedge between the houses in back of the courthouse. Since she was doing so behind a raised pistol, Mad Dog decided not to come up behind her and provoke an unpleasant surprise. Instead, he trotted through a rose garden at the south end of the back yard of one of those houses, hopped a fence that let him out on Oak Street, and proceeded west toward the corner.

  A row of catalpa trees lined the block ahead. Pale blossoms turned their thick foliage a ghostly shade of green and left the street in deep shadow. The north side of the street, past Monroe, was a green-gold wheat field, out of which a small figure ran, pell-mell, to where a motorcycle waited. The figure vaulted aboard, gunned the engine, then did a block-long wheelie, closely pursued. If the biker’s torn pant leg was any indication, Hailey had crossed his path while he was up to no good.

  Mad Dog whistled for her. She didn’t come and it didn’t surprise him. Even when she wasn’t busy protecting him from bad guys, or evil squirrels and rabbits, she didn’t obey commands and only occasionally met requests. She was his friend and partner, not his pet.

  Mad Dog couldn’t imagine what was going on. Apparently, someone had been shot by an arrow on Catfish Creek this morning. It had happened at the same time he was jogging by and Deputy Parker, whose opinion was not to be taken as lightly as Deputy Wynn’s, thought Mad Dog might have been the intended target. The manifest absurdity of that had to be weighed against the evidence of the two arrows he’d seen protruding from the back door to the courthouse. A motorcyclist had been present on both occasions. There didn’t seem much doubt the arrows at the courthouse had been meant for him, especially if Hailey was in full pursuit of the archer. The figure that had hopped on the Japanese crotch rocket had something slung over his shoulder. It could have been a bow.

  Hailey wouldn’t catch the motorcycle. Not unless she realized it had to turn south where Oak ended two blocks down at Van Buren. If she cut across a few yards, leapt a fence or two, and if the biker had to slow for traffic on Main, she just might catch him at the intersection. If she did, Mad Dog’s money was on Hailey. But, he didn’t want her hurt. In Buffalo Springs, there was always the chance of a farmer happening along with guns in the rack in his pickup’s back window. None of them was apt to stop and ask whether Mad Dog’s wolf-hybrid had good reason to be attacking a motorcycle rider. Most figured it was only a matter of time till she began killing their livestock or raiding their hen houses anyway.

  Mad Dog considered going back for the Mini, then abandoned the idea. He could get there faster taking his own shortcut through lawns, gardens, and alleys down to Main.

  Hailey did cut south before the motorcycle negotiated the corner. She was so smart it scared him sometimes.

  Mad Dog ducked beneath catalpas, dodged a row of evergreens, and listened hard to the note of the bike’s exhaust. He was waiting for the dramatic change in pitch that might indicate Hailey’s interception had succeeded.

  Mad Dog knew the quickest way through this neighborhood. He’d spent a lot of time here, back in the days when he was courting Janie Jorgenson. She’d lived just half a block north of Main on Jackson. He slid around familiar evergreens, bigger now, vaulted a fence he didn’t recall at all, discovered a new hole in the hedge that bordered the alley, and hit Jackson just short of Main. From the sound of it, his arrival there coincided with the moment the motorcycle cleared Main and Van Buren. To his surprise, the biker turned east, his direction. Mad Dog put on a burst, but the corner was just too far. The bike blasted past just as a silver-haired tundra wolf cleared a thick row of peonies in front of him. A middle-aged woman scuttled out of the flowerbed on hands and knees, frantically backing away from Hailey. Mad Dog lost his balance trying not to run over her, and, for the second time that day, went down hard on his left knee and the heels of his hands.

  He was calling on a different god than the one he favored when Hailey came back to apologize by slathering his face with kisses. He turned to the woman then.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. Hailey had transferred her tongue and attention to the woman’s face and she was trying to brush herself off and avoid the wettest of Hailey’s acts of contrition.

  “Yes,” she said. “Nothing bruised but my pride, I think. And I apologize about the flowerbed. I thought you’d set your dog on me, though I see now that she isn’t so much angry as affectionate.”

  The woman looked familiar. Not surprising, since, sooner or later, locals could hardly avoid encounters at the limited venues available for shopping or socializing. He didn’t understand about the flowerbed, though. She seemed to think it was his.

  “About the flowers…” he began.

  “I’m terribly, terribly sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to hurt your peonies. It’s just that I think my mother planted those and they’re so healthy and so beautiful. I didn’t think I’d do them much harm if I dug up a bit of root to try to start a bush at home.”

  Hailey was back, checking out Mad Dog’s injuries. His jeans had a fresh, blood-stained hole in one knee. A wound on the heel of his hand was seeping again as well. He was a mess, and suddenly very conscious of it because he knew who she was.

  The house where the row of peonies stood on the edge of the street was the one in which Janie Jorgenson had lived. The woman he and Hailey had bowled over looked familiar because she was the spitting image of Janie’s mother, the woman who’d tried to persuade her daughter she could do a lot better than Harvey Edward “Mad Dog” Maddox.

  “Janie?” he said, throwing an arm around Hailey’s shoulder because he had a sudden, desperate need to hold on to something. “Janie Jorgenson? Is that really you?”

  God, she was old. Still pretty, but no longer the adolescent cheerleader he’d fallen in love with. Was he so changed as well?

  “Do I know you?” she said. Apparently he was.

  He looked at her face more closely. There were lines there. And more flesh and it sagged a little, but underneath all that was a face he knew. Not her mother’s after all. Hell, she must be almost twenty years older than her mother had been. And so was he. Her eyes, though, they were the proof. They still sparkled, even at this moment of uncertainty and embarrassment—intelligent, laughing, irreverent, and home to a soul seeking something he’d been unable to provide.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and shook his head. He could still hear the archer on the mo
torcycle heading east on the blacktop as they sat in the middle of the street, safe, for the moment, in Buffalo Springs where nothing exciting ever happened.

  There were no cars behind Janie on Main Street, or south on Jackson all the way down to the railroad track. Just some girl, with platinum-blond punk hair, riding a bicycle.

  Janie squinted a little. “No,” she said. “Mad Dog?”

  And then the street south of Main disappeared in a cloud of smoke and a roar like thunder.

  ***

  “Keep him here,” Deputy Parker had said. Then she’d left Mad Dog and Wynn Some. She drew her SIG-Sauer as she went out the door. She stayed low and surveyed the environment for threats and targets. She couldn’t see any, nor did more arrows come from the vicinity of the hedge that lined the north end of the lot behind the courthouse. Judging from the angle at which the arrows stuck out of the back door, that seemed their likely source.

  The SIG was hers. She had put a lot of rounds through it on a variety of target ranges and she trusted it—far more than the worn .38 Smith & Wesson Sheriff English had offered with the job.

  Parker was accustomed to a more urban environment. She was used to checking rooftops and garbage bins rather than neatly trimmed hedges.

  Her first dash took her to the rear of Mad Dog’s new Mini Cooper. He’d parked near the back door, almost perfectly broadside to the hedge. She used the car’s body as a shield and the low roof for a firing platform. Nothing. No movement near the house behind the parking lot or along that thick hedge, other than the gentle teasing of leaves by a breeze that smelled better than her most expensive perfume.

  There was another arrow in the Mini Cooper. It lay in the driver’s seat, apparently having ricocheted after glancing off the dash. There was a tuft of hair near it, and a little blood. Mad Dog’s wolf had apparently been a target too. No wonder she wasn’t faithfully waiting for him in the car.

  Parker’s next sprint was across thirty yards of empty lot to the nearest corner of the hedge. It was the kind of run that made her sweat, and not because she was working muscles hard or because summer was on the way. It was feeling that target on her chest, the one that had been painted there since that day in Tucson.

  She’d been working Glenn Campbell’s greatest hits. That’s what motorcycle cops on the radar beat called a favorite spot on Glenn Street, a couple of blocks east of the intersection with Campbell Avenue. Traffic tended to bunch up and get frustrated about the time it reached Glenn. Angry drivers look for shortcuts, so Glenn got more than its share of people exceeding the thirty-mile-per-hour limit.

  She had pulled the old Chevrolet pickup over at a spot where one of Tucson’s many washes disappeared beneath the street. The truck’s tag was bent and muddy and illegible, matching the rest of the vehicle. She called in her position and a description, stepped off her bike, checked that her gun was free, and advanced to the driver’s window with the usual license and registration line.

  The driver had pale blue eyes and a crooked smile. That was all she noticed before she caught sight of the battered woman bound in duct tape on the passenger’s side floorboards. Even that hardly managed to register before he raised a pistol from his lap and pointed it squarely between her breasts. A year later, crossing a dusty Kansas parking lot, she still felt phantom echoes of the .45 slug that slammed into her vest, broke a couple of ribs, and knocked her on her backside, right out in the middle of Glenn. She remembered him adjusting his aim, raising the pistol to point at her face for the second shot. Maybe the UPS truck that missed clipping her by inches distracted him. He missed, but she didn’t. She blew his face off, never realizing there had been a UPS truck until she read witness reports afterward.

  The man in the pickup was dead. She’d known that before she got up off the street. Brain matter and bone and blood spoiled the truck’s headliner. It was the first time Parker had fired a shot at a person. It was hard enough, dealing with the result, even if he had tried to kill her twice, but not nearly as hard as what she found in the truck.

  The woman on the floorboards was struggling madly against the tape that bound her. When she saw Parker, she met her eyes with desperate intensity. “Mmmm,” she was saying. The duct tape wrapped around her mouth kept her from saying anything more plainly. But her eyes spoke. They flashed from Parker’s eyes to the belt of her freshly dead captor, then back again. “Mmmm,” she said. Parker looked where the woman’s eyes demanded and thought she understood.

  There was a switch on his belt. And wires. Bomb! That’s what Parker decided the woman was trying to say. The man’s hand, the one that hadn’t been holding the .45, was resting on the switch, but just barely. As she watched, Parker saw it begin to slip away. She reached through the window and grabbed his hand and the switch and made sure neither moved. The captive’s eyes rolled with what Parker thought was relief, but it was clear the woman was still terrified. She made the “Mmmm” sound again and Parker decided it was a dead man’s switch, the wires leading to a bomb under his jacket.

  She got the man’s body out of the cab without letting his hand leave the switch. He was a big man, but that didn’t matter, not with the adrenaline pumping and the woman’s terror feeding Parker’s own. She dragged him to the edge of the arroyo. It was almost six feet down to where the pipe went under Glenn. There were concrete walls around the pipe that would contain the explosion, direct it away from the street. Parker wrestled him to the edge, trailing blood from his ruined skull.

  His captive had managed to wiggle up into the passenger’s seat to where she could look out the window. As Parker maneuvered his body so that it would fall without taking her with it, she looked back. The woman’s eyes darted from Parker to the inside of the truck, like some trapped wild thing desperately seeking an escape.

  Here’s your freedom, Parker thought, and let go. His coat brushed the barricade that kept cars out of the wash. It pulled away from the place the wires went and Parker saw, even as she was diving for the street, that they weren’t connected to a bomb. It was a radio transmitter.

  And then he disappeared over the edge and there was a muffled crump from inside the truck. When Parker went to look, blood was everywhere—and broken glass and smoke and flame and a captive who’d been literally blown in two. The bomb had been under the duct tape that bound the woman, not on the man who couldn’t let her live without him.

  Both sides of the hedge behind the Benteen County courthouse were clear. There was no one at the corner of either of the houses whose yards it divided. No one hid in the thick vegetation. There was blood on the grass, though. Hailey’s? Parker chose the corner of the house on the south and sprinted again. Had Hailey come after the archer? Even wounded?

  A two-cycle motor whined to life just as she got to the building. She heard it scream its way through a couple of gears before she got her head around the corner behind her SIG. It was a motorcycle, painted an anonymous black and without a plate. The rider was bent low, an uncertain outline impossible to describe. The only thing that stood out was that he had something slung across his shoulder. A bow, maybe. And he, or she, had a torn pant leg, probably thanks to the pursuing wolf that followed the motorcycle as hard as she could go.

  Parker grabbed her radio to set up an intercept, only there was no one out there to do it. Deputy Wynn was in the courthouse. Sheriff English was miles away, interviewing people at this morning’s crime scene. The rest of the deputies were off duty and inconveniently distant. A murder suspect might get away unless a very determined wolf managed to run down a high performance motorcycle.

  She jammed the radio back in her belt and the SIG in its holster, disgusted, and turned to trot back to the courthouse. She was in the middle of the parking lot when she heard the explosion. It reminded her of the sheriff’s request that she determine whether a pipe bomber might be dangerous. The smoke that began clearing the tree tops south of her made her think the answer was affirmative.

  ***

  It sounded like a sonic boom, ma
ybe one of those Air Force fly boys on his way to McConnell over in Wichita, playing loose with the sound barrier. No matter what it sounded like, Mrs. Kraus knew what it was—another bomb.

  Her suspicions were confirmed in moments. They’d upgraded to two phone lines into the sheriff’s department a couple of years back. Both began to ring simultaneously.

  “The bank just blew up,” someone told her. She didn’t even manage to ask whether anyone was injured before the guy hung up without identifying himself.

  Line two was more helpful. It was the manager of the Farmers & Merchants. “We’ve been blown up,” Mr. Brown told her. “And robbed.” Line one began ringing again but Mrs. Kraus decided to let it go. This one promised to have the information Englishman and his deputies were going to need.

  “Anyone hurt?” That was the first thing to ask. Did she need to find Doc Jones or see if any of the other doctors who sometimes spent a day at the local clinic were in town? Get some help headed to the bank? Did she need to call an ambulance and emergency rescue crews? They’d have to come from outside the county so the sooner she got them on the way the better.

  “One of the tellers has a paper cut, and I bruised my shoulder on the door jamb when we were trying to evacuate the building. Other than that, we’re fine. What we really need, though, is for Englishman and his crew to get down here and secure the street. Mrs. Kraus, there’s cash money blowing down Jackson. We need help picking it up before it commences to disappear into people’s pockets. And we need that terrorist found right now.”

  “Terrorist?” Somehow it didn’t come as much of a shock to Mrs. Kraus. Not after her experience this morning. “You got a note?”