by J. M. Hayes
“How’d you know that?”
“I don’t just set over here in the courthouse and paint my nails,” she told him. “I been in law enforcement for…” She didn’t care to tell him how long it had actually been. She’d been gradually rinsing the gray away with that Egyptian Formula stuff she’d bought at Millie’s beauty shop and she was convinced many folks had begun to doubt she could have lived and worked in Buffalo Springs as long as she actually had. Those were doubts she preferred to encourage.
“Never mind,” she continued. “Tell me what you know. Just the facts.” She hadn’t taken many reports of serious crimes. Benteen County seldom gave her practice, but she’d seen Joe Friday on Dragnet often enough to have an opinion about how it should be done.
“Was that a bomb?” Chairman Wynn wanted to know, bursting through the door from the foyer and into the sheriff’s office. Supervisors Finfrock and Haines followed hard on his heels. Deputy Wynn tagged along and was equally helpful. “Aren’t you going to get that other line?”
Mrs. Kraus ignored them. She was taking notes so fast she wasn’t sure she would be able to read them later, not that she was likely to forget what Brown was telling her.
“There was a blond woman at the door when we opened this morning. Real short hair. Mean looking, my teller said. Said she didn’t want to open, only it was time and we’ve never been robbed before.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Kraus scrawled away.
“Yes? It was a bomb?” Finfrock’s voice rose.
Line one stopped ringing and Wynn Some scowled at her. “You never answered that,” he accused. “It might of been important.”
“We think she was an Ay-Rab in disguise. My teller, Lucy, found her note on the floor where she’d slipped it under the door. Read it after she let that woman in and just before she got handed the bomb. Then the robber demanded money. Hundreds. Probably part of a plan to copy them and use counterfeit bills and ruin our nation’s economy and destroy the western world.”
“A note?” Mrs. Kraus asked. “Do you have it?”
“What do I need a note for?” Wynn Some wanted to know. “Oh, and have you seen Mad Dog?”
“What’s going on, Mrs. Kraus?” This time it was the chairman himself asking. It didn’t matter. Mrs. Kraus had tuned out everyone but the man on the other end of the phone line.
“Yeah. I got it right here,” Brown said. “It says: ‘We now target your financial institutions. Capitalism cannot exist without banks. As you target the economy of Iraq, we target the Farmers & Merchants of Buffalo Springs. You seized Iraq’s oil fields. Now we will control yours. Shut them down at once. Close your service stations. No petroleum products are to be sold in Benteen County or our next strike will deliver more than mere shock and awe. Fear us and obey.’”
His voice paused and Mrs. Kraus took that to mean he’d finished the note. “That all?” she demanded. “Isn’t it signed by somebody who’s claiming responsibility?”
“Say, you do know your stuff,” the manager conceded. “There’s the name of some terrorist front at the bottom of the page.”
“What is it?”
“I was gonna get to it,” Brown grumbled. “Let’s see, here it is. ‘We are a brotherhood laboring to quench America’s evil designs and aggressions.’”
“And none of your note is capitalized,” Mrs. Kraus said. Line one was ringing again. She continued to ignore it. “Except for a few words at the end. What are the capital letters, Mr. Brown? Read them to me.”
“Wow,” Brown told her. “I never knew you were such a professional. You’re right again, though. There are a few capitalized letters down there. I just figured whoever wrote it, they must be uneducated heathens and that’s why they only capitalized a few letters at random, but Jesus. You’re right. Those capital letters, they spell al Qaeda.”
“My God!” the supervisors chorused as they saw Mrs. Kraus add the dreaded name to her notes. Wynn Some hadn’t been paying attention. He’d finally decided to make himself useful and answer line one himself.
“Hey,” he said. “You won’t believe this. Somebody blew up the bank.”
***
Judy sat on her bike in the middle of Jackson Street and told herself things like that didn’t happen in Benteen County.
The Farmers & Merchants had already stopped burning. Dust and greenbacks were beginning to settle, some carried toward her on today’s gentle version of the constant winds that swept the Plains looking for a mountain range or a hill, or even an occasional prairie dog mound, to slow them down.
A crowd was gathering in the street. Maybe a dozen people—all the merchants and shoppers who’d been in nearby buildings on this business day. There wasn’t a lot of business in Buffalo Springs anymore, so it wasn’t much of a crowd.
“Anyone killed?” someone called.
“No. Not even hurt to speak of. We all got out in time.” That was the teller’s voice, the one who’d waited on her…and apparently taken her for a bank robber. What had been in that note the woman picked up off the floor as she unlocked the front door? Judy didn’t like the possibilities.
Damn it to hell. All she wanted to do was get herself aboard a Paris-bound jet, and drag her husband, a reluctant traveler under any circumstances, along with her. She thought she’d nearly had him. Their unusually passionate morning, and a healthy dose of guilt, seemed to have weakened him. Then he got that phone call. A body out where they were filming This Old Tepee. And now this, a bombing, in which she might have played an unintentional role. Lord, she really would play hell getting Englishman on that plane now.
And might play hell getting herself on it, if she were identified as the bomber. She opened her fanny pack and pulled out the crumpled baseball cap she kept in there with the seldom fulfilled intention of screening the sun from freckling her nose. She set it atop her newly blond skull—not much of a disguise, but all she had.
No one was hurt. She didn’t know a thing about that envelope, except that it had been stuffed under the flap that covered the night deposit drop instead of inside the building, where she’d delivered it. Out there, it probably wouldn’t have done nearly as much damage. Not unless someone was walking past when it went off.
This didn’t seem like the moment to explain that to people. She would tell Englishman later. Maybe when they were over the Atlantic and he couldn’t turn around and go back to save the county from this latest crime wave.
Some of the crowd was headed her way, running around, trying to pick up the cash that was blowing down the street like autumn leaves. One of them might have noticed the blond bomber leaving the scene of the crime on a bicycle. It might not be much of a leap to put that together with the recently baseball-capped bicyclist watching from where the bomber had gone. Judy got her feet on the pedals and aimed herself into the gap between a couple of buildings where there had once been a blacksmith’s shop. Now it was just a vacant lot filled with grass and blooming weeds and a bit of debris that included plastic bags and crumpled newspaper and a few federal reserve notes.
That Murphy guy had been on to something when he postulated his law. Nothing ever happened in Benteen County. There hadn’t ever been a murder here until six years ago, or not one that’d been public knowledge until Mad Dog’s wolf started finding human skeletal remains in that blizzard a couple of years back. Let one little murder happen and it seemed like everything else started going to hell in a handbasket.
How was she going to get Englishman on that plane? She shook her head and stuck to the back streets as she pedaled home. She didn’t want anyone to recognize her just now. Not until she decided how to handle her involvement, and who, if anyone, needed to know.
Now Englishman was really going to dig in. Unless she was lucky and the murderer had been standing over the body on Catfish Creek, ready to sign a confession, Englishman would be neck deep in that investigation. On top of that, he was about to get mixed up in the hunt for a blond bombsheller cum bank robber, with whom he’d had gratuitous sex that very morning
—then, when she’d explained, after the person who left the bomb in the deposit box to begin with. He wasn’t going to want to leave town until both the murder and the bombing were solved. He didn’t want to leave in the first place. She was going to have to be very persuasive. The whole bag of tricks—threats, tears, love, lies. Whatever it took. Judy was going to Paris today, and if there was any way possible, she was dragging Englishman with her.
***
Just what the sheriff needed, the kind of emergency that forced him to abandon a murder investigation well before he had a suspect. Mrs. Kraus was clear, though. The bank had been robbed and blown up. There was no longer any question of whether they should take the pipe bomb seriously. They were damn lucky no one had been hurt yet. The bomber’s notes seemed to indicate this hadn’t been just about the money, not with more explosions threatened.
On top of that, Mrs. Kraus told him, someone had been taking archery practice at Mad Dog when he tried to leave the courthouse a few minutes ago. Then that someone hopped on a motorcycle and sped away before anyone could pursue him. And now Mad Dog had gone missing again. If the sheriff’s brother knew who was after him, he hadn’t shared the knowledge before skipping out on the ever-less-than-vigilant Deputy Wynn.
“Okay,” the sheriff said to Mrs. Kraus. “I’m on my way. See if you can call in any more deputies. Send Parker to the bank to secure the scene and start interviewing witnesses. Have Wynn knock on doors out back of the courthouse, then through the neighborhood down to Main. Ask if anyone saw our archer or his motorcycle and recognized him, or noticed something that’ll help us identify him. Maybe the supervisors can volunteer to help him. I’ll be there in ten minutes.”
Mrs. Kraus acknowledged his instructions and he hung up the cell phone and clipped it on his belt, just behind his .38 Smith & Wesson Police Special. He was faster drawing the cell phone these days.
The sheriff turned toward his truck and was surprised to discover his passenger’s seat was occupied. Bud Stone sat there, impassive, staring across the peeling paint on the Chevy’s hood toward the circle of tepees in the Lancasters’ pasture.
“Look,” the sheriff told him. “I’ve got an emergency in town.”
“My daughter and granddaughter are packing. They will load our car and come to town to pick me up. We’re going home to Oklahoma. The boy’s death, it spoils what I hoped to do here.”
“I’m not sure I can let you leave while I’m still investigating this.”
“That’s one reason I will ride with you. I can answer any questions you have. Then, when the women come, you will have no more need for me.”
“Oh, hell,” the sheriff said. “What I don’t have time to do is sit here and argue. Belt yourself in. This will be a quick trip.”
The old man seemed completely unaffected by the sheriff’s wild exit from the pasture.
“And I hope to be able to find your brother. Talk with him a little before we leave.” His voice came out a bit uneven, but it was only because of the way the truck was bouncing down a dirt road that hadn’t been maintained well enough to encourage speed.
“I’d like to find him myself,” the sheriff said. “Well, we’re headed the right direction. He was in town, last anybody saw him, and his car’s still there.”
Stone nodded, as if he’d known Mad Dog was there all along. The sheriff caught it out of the corner of his eye. He was too busy watching for potholes and soft sand to spare a glance.
“I do not know your brother,” the old man said, “so I have no opinion whether someone might want to kill him. But I have come to know the people with whom I was encamped. Michael was a confused boy. I say boy rather than man because that is what I mean. He was younger than his years, though he did not think so. People might want to use him, because he could be used, but he did not stand for anything, did not have anything that could not be taken from him.”
The sheriff narrowly missed a chicken that picked a bad time to explore the eternal question of why it should cross the road.
“You already told me you don’t think he was the target.”
“I do not know who the target was. There are those who might want to hurt Michael to keep Daphne from him, but they would not need to kill him. She would not have stayed with him. There is not a man here she would not go with. Even me. She will collect men for a while, until she collects the wrong one.”
“You think the girl might have been the target?” The sheriff put the truck in a power slide that took them around the first corner leading to the nearest blacktop.
“She does not stand for anything either, but she has something men want. Some men want it exclusively. She would not accept that.”
“Interesting,” the sheriff said, more confused than enlightened, “but we’re pretty sure that arrow was meant for my brother. He was nearly hit. And from where the bowman stood, it would have been hard to see those kids by the creek. Michael getting shot…I’m almost certain it was just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time taken to its extreme.”
The old man shook his head. “None of us, I think, were anywhere other than where we had to be.”
The truck dropped into a low spot, a dusky stretch where a domed loft of cottonwoods meandered along the road while following another shallow creek. The red and blue lights on the sheriff’s front bumper lit the shadows as the truck rattled the bridge at the bottom, then spat gravel climbing back to the flatlands above.
“You really should talk to my brother,” the sheriff said. And then he got busy because a motorcycle had appeared out of nowhere, dropping down from the far end of the shady corridor even faster than they rose to meet it. The sheriff’s antilock brakes didn’t matter much on sand and washboard gravel. Two-wheeled vehicles were even less capable of panic stops. The sheriff tried to hug his ditch, only there wasn’t really one to hug, just blooming weeds and clumps of saplings before he would begin testing the Chevy’s bumper against immense tree trunks.
In retrospect, the sheriff didn’t see how it was possible, but he not only missed the cottonwoods, he missed the motorcycle. The motorcycle careened by, inches from his door, before losing momentum and balance and toppling over as it crossed the bridge. If the rider had still been aboard, he would have impacted the sheriff’s driver’s side mirror as he went by.
“What happened to him?” the sheriff said, trying to check everywhere at once. His truck had stopped crossways in the road, enfolded by a cloud of dust.
“Over there,” Stone said. The sheriff looked where the Cheyenne’s eyes pointed. A tangle of bloody rags lay at the base of one of the cottonwoods. It no longer resembled clothing. Nor did what was inside it resemble a human being.
“Oh God, I’ve killed somebody out for an innocent ride.”
“More his fault than yours,” Stone observed, “and not so innocent, I think.” He nodded a few yards back up the road to where a broken pile of sticks and feathers lay bound together by a piece of cord.
“That was a Cheyenne bow and he had it slung across his shoulder.”
***
“You haven’t changed,” Mad Dog said. She had, of course. She’d changed so much that he hadn’t recognized her, and then his first thought was of her mother. But, when he said it now, he was being absolutely honest. He’d looked into her eyes and found her there. This fifty-seven-year-old woman sitting in the street beside him had miraculously shed more than forty years in an instant. Knowing her, he would never again see her as anything but young and vivacious and stunningly beautiful, just as she’d been when they were teenagers exploring the uncharted territories of lust and romance.
She shook her head and smiled and he recognized the smile and adored it, just as he always had.
“You still say the most outrageous things, and almost make me believe them. But even with that moonstruck look in your eyes, that’s too much. I’m four decades older, thirty pounds heavier, and look about as much like the head cheerleader of the Buffalo Springs Bisons as you do.” Her
eyes twinkled. “But thank you for lying about it anyway.”
“No, really…” Mad Dog began, but he didn’t know how to explain it.
“I won’t be quite so generous, Mad Dog, but I will say the years have been kind to you. And I’d go on with more of that lovely chit-chat, except I believe a building just blew up down the street. Don’t you think we should go see if anyone needs help?”
Fallout was beginning to drift across Main Street. It consisted of a bit of smoke, a lot of dust, an assortment of paper, and a couple of twenty dollar bills. Mad Dog got up and collected them. They were crisp and new and clean, until he touched them. He had blood on his hand. He had forgotten he was hurt again. He wiped his hands on his Levis.
“Looks like it might have been the Farmers & Merchants,” he said. One of his hands was reasonably clean. No blood anyway. He offered it to Janie. “I’ll go check it out with you as long as you promise not to run out on me again. Not before we have a chance to talk.”
“Maybe one of the things we should talk about,” she said, taking his hand and climbing back to her feet, “is who ran out on whom.”
Mad Dog looked surprised. “Me? I’m still here. I live in the same house I did when you left. And I tried hard to find out where you’d gone…at least for a while.”
“Oh sure. I left and you didn’t. And I knew you tried to find me. You always were a bit of a stalker. But who left the relationship? That’s what I mean.”
Mad Dog grabbed a stray five dollar bill and the two of them crossed Main and headed south on Jackson. They could hear people calling each other, marveling that no one had been hurt.
“Stalker?”
“Sure. Don’t you remember that time I went on a date with Fred Hendershot and you trailed us all the way to the Cinerama in Wichita and back?”
Mad Dog looked sheepish. “I was only…”
“Or when we had the fight and I thought we broke up and you decided not to call me for a few days to teach me a lesson. Then Stan Bowser asked me to go roller skating and you came and kidnapped me right out of the rink.”