by J. M. Hayes
***
“Hi, Mom,” Heather said to her cell phone. She was helping move tubs of ice cream out of the freezer in the Buffalo Springs Non-Denominational Church. The ice cream social would begin when the parade ended at Veterans Memorial Park. Two of Two was out there already, filling balloons with helium and showing kids how to make squeaky voices. Entertaining that hunk who was home from KU for a few days, too, and who was seriously pleased with the outfit Two had chosen that morning. One of Two might have felt left out, except she wasn’t so much moving ice cream as supervising its movement. A couple of guys who’d been so far ahead of her in high school that she’d gone unnoticed by them had belatedly discovered her at the potluck. One was a junior at Ft. Hays, the other a senior at K-State. Both were handsome and mature and she was enjoying the way they were competing for her attention.
“Why didn’t you come to the potluck?” she asked, while each of the guys tried to carry more tubs than the other.
“Something came up,” her mother said. There was a long pause as if her mom couldn’t decide whether to tell her what that something was.
“What’s that, Mom?” Heather asked. She had to stifle a giggle because the K-Stater was exaggerating his efforts to keep a gigantic stack of ice cream balanced, like some comedian from a silent movie clip.
“I, uhh…I need the car. Where is it?”
“You want me to bring it to you?”
“It’d probably be quicker if I came and got it.”
“I don’t mind,” Heather told her mother. She didn’t, really. It would only take a minute, and maybe her helpers, or one of them, might come along.
“Where is it, Heather? I’m late.”
“For what, Mom?”
There was another pause and Heather thought she could feel the steam her mother was generating through the phone’s receiver. “The car’s just north of Bertha’s on Adams, Mom. But you probably should let me get it for you. The parade’s coming and that’s where they’ll end up. You might not have time to get here before they block you in.”
“All right. Just bring the damn car. I’ve got to catch a plane for Paris.”
“What?” Heather asked, suddenly oblivious to the guys vying for her attention. Her mother didn’t answer. The dial tone suddenly hummed in her ear.
***
The Kansas Bureau of Investigation knew the state had a Benteen County, and that its sheriff was named English.
“How’s the weather in Buffalo Springs, Sheriff English?” the agent asked as the sheriff dodged the parade on Main Street.
“Probably about as perfect as it is in Topeka.”
“Which means we’ll either have a hard freeze next week, or hit a hundred.”
“Uhh, look,” the sheriff said, anxious to get past the niceties. “We got a situation here.”
“Yes, sir,” the agent said, suddenly businesslike.
“We’ve had some bombings.” The sheriff made a left on Pear so he could slip around the block and enter the Bisonte’s parking lot via the alley instead of Main.
“Bombings? Plural, as in more than one?”
“Three so far, with notes that hint at an al Qaeda connection.”
“You shoveling your barnyard on me?” the man in Topeka asked. The sheriff realized how crazy it sounded—al Qaeda in Buffalo Springs, Kansas. “How many killed?”
“Two,” the sheriff said. “Though they didn’t die in the bombings, actually. In fact, nobody’s been hurt by the bombs, so far.”
“Two dead, but not from your terrorist bombings?”
“That’s right. One was shot by a Cheyenne arrow and the other lost control of a motorcycle. I think that one was the archer from the first death.”
The sheriff paused to catch his breath and make another turn. The man in Topeka paused too. The sheriff could practically hear the silent disbelief halfway across the state. He slid into the alley and bounced to a parking spot beside the bar.
“Look,” he continued. “I know the al Qaeda thing is unlikely, but we’re a real small department and we’re spread too thin for stuff like this and…”
“What’s that noise in the background?” the KBI agent interrupted.
It took the sheriff a minute to realize what the man meant. He must have heard the Buffalo Springs High marching band, in the middle of a cacophony that faintly resembled something by John Philip Sousa.
“It’s a band,” the sheriff explained. “There’s a parade for our Buffalo Springs Day festival. I tried to get the county supervisors to cancel it but…”
“Harley Beaudean, right? Jeez, Harley, you really had me going for a minute.”
“This is no joke, agent,” the sheriff said. “This is a legitimate crisis. A bizarre one I’ll grant…”
“Harley, I got too much caseload to listen to any more BS just now. I’ll meet you for a beer after work and you can tell me where you found that awful music.”
“Don’t you have caller ID or something?”
“Good one, Harley. Really good. You can scoop me more of this over at the Bullfrog about five-thirty.” Then the man hung up.
The sheriff thought about hitting redial and trying to convince the KBI he wasn’t a practical joker named Harley. Then he considered what might happen if he wasted time on the phone while a fourth device went off in the middle of that parade or during the festivities in Veterans Memorial Park. He had no time to argue, especially not if the source of their bombs lay behind the door to the adjacent bar.
The sheriff holstered Wynn’s cell phone and drew his .38 Police Special, opened the cylinder. Five bullets, the hammer over an empty chamber, just the way he wanted it.
“Whatcha doin’?” Wynn asked. The sheriff wondered when Wynn had last seen him draw his gun.
“Lock and load,” the sheriff said. The phrase surprised him as much as it probably did his deputy. Embarrassed him a little too, as he realized how much adrenaline had to be flowing for him to say something so Hollywood macho. “Let’s see if Osama has moved al Qaeda headquarters right here to the heart of Kansas.”
***
“So that’s what the luggage was for. Do you know anything about this trip to Paris?” Two asked her sister as the girls made their way across the park to where they’d left the station wagon. Three decreasingly enthusiastic upperclassmen, volunteers for ice cream and balloon duty, watched from where the Heathers had left them with a half-hearted promise to be right back.
“Mom always wanted to go.” Heather English dug keys out of her purse as they edged around a grove of evergreens. Little of the park’s two square blocks was ever mowed or weeded because of the county’s strained budget. They stayed on a path to avoid stickers and brambles. “You’ve heard her talk about it. Dad’s always got some excuse to put it off. What’s hard for me, though, is they made these plans without telling us.”
“No way Englishman will go today.” Two said. “I mean, Judy’s going to have to wrestle him onto a plane even when he’s ready to take time off. He won’t leave while a mad bomber’s running around.”
“There were two sets of luggage, and Dad’s passport. But Mom just said she had to catch a plane to Paris. She didn’t mention Dad. You think Mom would go by herself?”
“Hey, you’re the one who’s known her all your life,” Two said. “What do you think?”
“Paris,” One said. “Jeez. If she’s really mad at him, she might go alone.”
The girls scrambled into the elderly Taurus as the Buffalo Springs High Band rounded the corner down on Main and headed their way. The Ford started without complaint and backed onto Jefferson, irritating a small group of citizens who had to make way by getting out of the middle of the street, thus giving up the prime locations they’d chosen to watch the parade approach.
“Mom sounded weird,” Heather said, turning right on Cherry. Their house was at the end of the fourth block east of the park, just northwest of the Buffalo Springs Schools. “I mean, it was like she was trying to get the car and sli
p out of town, and when she had to tell me where she was going she hung up so she wouldn’t have to explain.”
“That’s not like Judy,” the second Heather said.
They pulled up at the stop sign at Adams. Not a rolling stop. The full thing, and checked carefully in both directions before proceeding. After all, their father was sheriff.
“Like I said,” the original Heather explained, “if she’s totally ticked at Dad, there’s no telling what she might do. She didn’t want me to bring the car. She wanted to come get it herself until I told her she might get blocked by the parade. That was the first she mentioned Paris.”
“I don’t get it,” the second Heather said. “This is like too weird.”
And it was.
They stopped in front of the house and parked under the shade of a pair of elms that flanked their walk. The Heathers were out of the car and going through the front gate, side by side, when the door opened and a stranger came out carrying a pair of suitcases.
“Help me with these, will you girls?” the stranger said with a familiar voice.
“Mom?” Heather said.
“Judy?” Heather echoed.
Then in chorus, the girls demanded, “What have you done to your hair?”
***
“Finfrock in?” The sheriff asked the bartender. The man slouched in the Bisonte’s front door, sucking a toothpick and watching a series of convertibles pass. The cars were filled with pretty girls waving to the sparse crowd. Normally, those girls would have been flanking each of the Benteen County Commissioners and the sheriff would have been out front, in the county black and white, leading the procession with his light bar blazing.
“Aw, damn,” the man said, straightening and displaying enough muscle inside his tight tee shirt to cause Deputy Wynn to back-pedal a couple of steps and put his hand on the butt of his gun. It didn’t matter. The sheriff had disabled the deputy’s service revolver years ago, after it became clear that an armed Wynn was a threat to public safety. The sheriff made him turn it in at the end of every shift and kept it locked in a drawer in his desk so his deputy couldn’t take it out for target practice and discover it had been rendered merely ornamental. The sheriff had worried about leaving Wynn defenseless in case of a real emergency, but there had been no more than a couple of those in Benteen County since he’d become sheriff many terms ago. Besides, he only had to recall the time Wynn Some drew down on a crowd of senior citizens because he thought one of them had hit him with a snowball. One had, but the sheriff never let Wynn carry a gun with a firing pin again.
“Mad Dog actually went and told you, didn’t he?” the bartender complained. “I was hopin’ he was joshing me. I know he’s got kind of a liberal outlook on guns and all, but I didn’t think he was a tattletale.”
“That was a hand grenade he brought to my office,” the sheriff countered, “not a gun. And we’ve had three bombings in Buffalo Springs this morning. It would take one hell of a bad citizen not to tell me about discovering illegal explosives today.”
“Illegal. Sheriff, ain’t you read your Second Amendment?”
“Many times. It doesn’t mention hand grenades.”
“Thing was just innocently lying back there in Mr. Finfrock’s private collection. I mean, it was more like it was in a museum until that wolf of Mad Dog’s let herself back there and brought it out into the bar.”
“Which brings me back to my first question,” the sheriff said. “Finfrock here?”
“Nope. He’s not. I figured he’d be in one of them convertibles that just went by.”
The convertibles had been replaced by the clowns and the man on stilts. Next would come the horseback contingent. From marching band to the last of the pretend cowboys, the whole parade would have passed in under five minutes.
“I want to see this museum,” the sheriff said.
That’s when the bartender should have asked to see the search warrant that was still with Mrs. Kraus back over in the courthouse, but he didn’t.
“Sure,” he said. “Normally, I couldn’t show you. Mr. Finfrock, he keeps it locked up in that back room of his. Only this morning, for some reason, seems he went off and left it open. Had to be, right, else how’d Hailey get in there to steal that grenade in the first place?”
The bartender stepped aside and held the door for the sheriff and Deputy Wynn. “Can I get either of you gentlemen anything?” he said, as he escorted them toward the bar. The place was empty. “Hardly anybody been in this morning,” he explained when the sheriff declined the offer and before Wynn could ask for a free soda pop. “You’da thought Mr. Finfrock would just leave us closed till this afternoon. Hard to compete with a potluck and free ice cream. Should do real good later on.”
The sheriff agreed. Buffalo Springs Day got him an occasional rowdy drunk whose expectations of coming home for the reunion didn’t match the reality. The sheriff followed the bartender and Wynn followed him and they made their own little parade to Finfrock’s office.
“You’re lucky I didn’t lock this back up after Mad Dog and that pretty lady left. Only I wanted to show Mr. Finfrock how I found it, and how that wolf got back here. See, I don’t got keys to his collection room, though he lets me in most times I want.”
The man opened the last door and stepped inside, reaching over and snapping on the lights. Museum, the sheriff decided, had been an accurate description. There was enough weaponry to outfit one of those second-amendment militias the bartender seemed to favor, but it was all lovingly displayed in cases and shelves covered with soft cloth. Some of the more exotic stuff was in glass display cases.
The sheriff was no arms expert, but he recognized a Browning automatic rifle, an M16, several varieties of AK47, a MAC-10, and then some heavier stuff including a .50 caliber machine gun. The row of grenades, minus the one with Mrs. Kraus over in the office, was right where she’d told him to expect it.
Only a few feet away was an ancient rifle. It lay atop a glass case filled with sabers and epees and such. It was a Sharps buffalo gun, just like Mrs. Kraus had reported Mad Dog found—and just like the gun Bradley Davis, director of This Old Tepee, had said was stolen from the same locked cabinet as the Cheyenne bow and arrows connected to the two corpses in Klausen’s Funeral parlor.
“What about this?” the sheriff asked, pointing out the antique atop the display of edged weapons.
“The buffalo gun? That’s new. Mr. Finfrock, he traded for it just last night.”
“Who’d he trade with?” the sheriff demanded.
The bartender shook his head. “I don’t know. Was my night off. But I heard Mr. Finfrock grousing about what he had to give for it.” The man crouched down and opened the door to a cabinet under a row of modern machine pistols. He reached in and hauled out a small drum and showed it to the sheriff and his deputy proudly.
“We used to have two of these.”
The sheriff bent and took a closer look. The drum was stenciled with a complex series of specifications. Most of the numbers meant nothing to him, but one caught his eyes. It read, “TNT equivalence: 118%.”
“Is this…” The sheriff had a sinking feeling that he knew what was inside.
“That’s right,” the bartender nodded, enthusiastically. “It’s C4 plastic explosive. Plastique. I betcha there’s enough in here to level most of Buffalo Springs.”
***
Janie Jorgenson was aroused. It surprised her when she finally recognized the feelings. She thought she was panting nearly as hard as Hailey, in the back seat, as she watched Mad Dog’s still cute butt disappear into the Dillons. She hadn’t felt this way since…well, not for a long time. Not since the hot flashes and the insomnia and the mood swings came along. Thank goodness those were past her now, but with them had gone her femininity, or so she’d thought. Until she’d seen that familiar look in Mad Dog’s eyes. Was that part of what brought her back here?
She remembered their visits to that swimming hole on Calf Creek like they were yesterday. Hot
sun, hot water, hot bodies pressed against each other. They had been drunk with the need for each other then. She flushed and tried to make herself sober up and return to here and now. She wouldn’t be wearing that same svelte body to Calf Creek today. Of course, neither would Mad Dog, though she thought he might still look pretty good at a skinny dip. All she’d meant to do was get him out of town for a few hours. Get him off the streets and away from danger until…
Janie was fifty-seven years old, and though she swam at least an hour four days a week, she was carrying a lot more flesh these days. And not where the girls in the centerfolds or on the movie screens carried it. She had cellulite and stretch marks and varicose veins, to say nothing of boobs that were more pendulous than perky. She couldn’t imagine how Mad Dog would be able to look at her without cringing if she shucked out of her clothes the way she found herself wanting to.
And there was Sam to deal with. Running off to indulge in a fantasy frolic while trying to pretend the last forty years hadn’t happened wouldn’t do a thing about Sam.
Hailey stuck her nose in Janie’s face and licked her, as if she’d been following this internal dialogue and wanted to offer encouragement. And then, with surprising agility, Hailey hopped into the driver’s seat, scooted around to face out the driver’s window, and launched herself into the parking lot.
“Hailey, come back,” Janie called.
Hailey, of course, paid her no attention, except for a reassuring glance over one shoulder as if to say, don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.
An old Ford pickup with a camper shell on the back pulled into the Dillons lot. A pair of dark-skinned women, Hispanic maybe, with long shiny-black hair popped the doors and got out and waved toward the grocery store. Janie turned and looked in that direction. She hadn’t noticed him before. He was sitting against the wall, legs folded underneath him. He waved casually back, unfolded those legs, and stood. He was a big man with steel gray braids hanging beneath a billed cap. Not Mexican, she decided, Native American.
The man started across the parking lot toward the truck. He didn’t get far before Hailey trotted over and sat in front of him, directly in his path. Most people would have shied away from an animal they feared might bite, or sidestepped her, knowing she was somebody else’s responsibility. The man with the braids stopped dead still and considered her. He said something that Janie couldn’t hear and reached out and presented his hand for her to sniff. Hailey accepted the offer, let him pat her on the head, then lay down. It wasn’t a casual on-her-side sort of down, but perfectly straight, legs neatly balanced on either side of her body so that you could picture her being up and about her business—including tearing out his throat if that were what she wanted—in an instant.