An Obvious Fact Read online

  “Oh, this is going to be an interesting two days.”

  We rounded the corner, the crowd thinned out, and we stood in front of the Hulett Police Department office, located next to what looked to be a fifteen-ton military vehicle.

  The Cheyenne Nation rested a fist on his hip and stared at the white monstrosity. “What is that?”

  I shook my head and pushed open the Hulett Police Department door. It was a small office as police offices go, with a counter and two desks on the other side. An older, smallish man sat at one of them with his hat over his face. He started when I closed the door, but the hat didn’t move. “By God, before you say anything, whoever you are, there better be a bleedin’ body lying in the street before you wake me all the way up.”

  “You haven’t been all the way woke up since I met you.”

  He slipped the hat off and looked at me. “How the hell are you, Walt Long-Arm-of-the-Law?”

  I spread my palms. “Vacationing.”

  He stood and placed the straw hat on his head. “In lovely Hulett, Wyoming?” He walked over and, making a face, shook my hand. “During Ham ’N Jam?” He glanced at the Cheyenne Nation and then extended the same hand to him. “Henry Standing Bear—you come over here to show all these lawyers, dentists, and accountants what a real outlaw looks like?”

  Henry shook. “How are you, Nutter Butter?”

  William Nutter had been the chief of police in Hulett for as far back as anyone could remember. A tough individual with a mind of his own, he kept the town running smoothly; if the man had an enemy in the world, I didn’t have an idea who that might be.

  “Ready to retire and even more so after this last weekend.”

  I nodded and threw a thumb over my shoulder. “What, in the name of all that’s holy, is that behemoth sitting out there?”

  He smiled. “An MRAP, stands for Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected. We got a bunch of that Patriot Act money that’s still around and some funding from a local citizen, name of Bob Nance. He wrote up all the paperwork for us. Hell, the federal government’s got twelve thousand of the things—we grabbed one before the ban.”

  “Your town has less than four hundred people in it.”

  He gestured toward the overcrowded street. “Not today, it doesn’t.”

  Henry parted the venetian blinds and peered at the thing. “What are you going to do with it?”

  Nutter shrugged. “I don’t know—we’ve got to figure out how to start it first.” His eyes played around the littered room. “I got the manual around here somewhere, if you guys want to give it a try.”

  “It’s very white.”

  “It was used by the United Nations.”

  “What does it weigh?”

  “About fifteen tons.”

  “And how many miles to the gallon does it get?”

  “I don’t know, maybe three.” He leaned on the counter and tugged at his hat like he was saddling up. “We’re not allowed to use any town or county money to maintenance the thing, so either Bob needs to come up with some more funding or what it’s going to end up being is a big, white lawn ornament.” He smiled as Henry continued to stare at the massive vehicle. “She’s a beauty, though, isn’t she?”

  I scrubbed a hand over my face and changed the subject to the one at hand. “So, you want to tell us about the incident this last weekend?”

  He shook his head. “No, I’d rather you talk to the investigating officer, who I assume is the one who called you?”

  “He did.” I studied Nutter, taking in the accumulation of lines on his face, more than I’d remembered from last time.

  He moved toward a radio console and, holding up a finger toward us, picked up one of the old-style desk mics. “Woof, woof—hey, Deputy Dog, where are you?”

  There was a pause, and then a voice I recognized came over the speaker. “Please don’t call me that.”

  Nutter immediately barked into the mic again. “Woof, woof, woof! Where are you? The Lone Ranger and Tonto are here for a powwow.”

  There was another pause. “I’m down here in front of the Pondo doing a sobriety test on a guy who thinks riding drunk is the same as stumbling down the sidewalk.” There was a voice in the background and more conversation before he came back on. “I’m right here on Main Street—how did I miss them?”

  “We came in and parked in the alley.”

  Nutter relayed the message and then sent us on our way back to the Ponderosa Café and Bar. As we closed the door, he called out, “Don’t forget to ask Deputy Dog how he got his name.”

  • • •

  “It was stupid.”

  “It usually is.” I leaned back in my chair, sipped my coffee, and studied the former Gillette patrolman and Campbell County deputy, Corbin Dougherty.

  “Our K9 guy was a little weird.”

  “They usually are.”

  He sighed. “The dog companies were sending us all these samples—you know, shock collars and stuff? So the K9 guy gets to wondering how bad the shock is.”

  The Cheyenne Nation, who had been gazing out the window, turned back to look at the deputy. “What did he ever do to you?”

  He shrugged. “His dog bit me. I mean, he’s the K9 guy, so he should have control over his dog, right?” Corbin looked around the packed café and lowered his voice. “I told him he should try one on—you know, get a feeling for the things before he put them on his dog.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.” He glanced around again. “So, we’re in the day room, and this idiot puts the dog collar on. I don’t mean just held it there; I mean he buckled the thing on around his neck. So, then he starts barking, real low, like ‘woof.’”

  I peered at him through the fingers covering my face. “Barking?”

  “Honest to God—I guess he figured since it was a dog shock collar . . .”

  “Let me guess what happened.”

  “Nothing at first, but he kept barking louder and finally it kicked in, and you’ve never seen anything like it. I mean, the things have these little prongs on the inside that are supposed to work through the insulation of the dog’s fur, but this was bare skin on this idiot’s neck.”

  I tried to keep from laughing, but it was hard. “Then what?”

  “It flipped him back over the table and put him on the floor. Honest, it was like he was struck by lightning—like a Taser, only way worse. Well, every time the thing shocks him he yells, so it shocks him again.”

  “What did you do?”

  Corbin paused as a waitress arrived and set our breakfasts in front of us. He watched her go and then continued. “What do you mean what did we do? Nothing. Everybody hates the son of a bitch; that damn dog of his has bitten all of us. So, he’s flopping around on the floor, screaming and getting lit up like a Christmas tree, and we’ve all got our cell phones out taking video.”

  Henry nodded. “The brotherhood of blue.”

  Corbin sipped his coffee. “Anyway, one of the other officers posted the thing on YouTube, and it went viral. The Trib did a story, and Sandy Sandberg needed a fall guy; I was the one with least seniority.”

  “So, here you are in Hulett.”

  “You weren’t hiring.”

  I sipped my own coffee. “I’m always hiring.”

  The young deputy forked a strawberry. “Besides, it’s nice over here, and I met a girl in Sundance.”

  The Bear and I looked at each other. “There is always a girl.”

  I remembered the pit bull we’d dropped on the young man last winter. “She like your dog, Deputy?”

  He smiled. “More than me.”

  We started eating in earnest, and the conversation died down. Corbin, the healthiest of us, finished his oatmeal and fruit and straightened his paper placemat before introducing the subject of why we were there. “I hope you don’t mind me calling
, but I figured after you’d helped out with that mess in Campbell County . . .”

  I leaned back in the booth. “This star for hire.”

  He looked up, a little panicked. “I can’t pay you anything, Walt.”

  “That was a joke.”

  “Oh.” He gathered his napkin from his lap. “Did you stop on your way in and look at the accident site?”

  “We did, but it was wet and kind of hard to tell what had happened.”

  Dougherty glanced around at the crowded café again and whispered, “There was a lot of blood.”

  “Rain must’ve washed it away.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, I mean they had him stabilized down at County Memorial in Sundance, but they moved him to Rapid City. Too small a hospital to keep him here.”

  “He?”

  “The victim—last name Torres, twenty-two years of age, out of Tucson, Arizona. He’s got a bunch of priors, mostly drugs along with a few domestics, and an aggravated assault and weapons charge.”

  “Had he been drinking?”

  Corbin shrugged. “A little, according to the doctors, but nothing too bad.”

  “Current condition?”

  “Assorted, along with a whopper of a traumatic brain injury. B-way—” He looked up at me. “That’s what they call him, B-way—has got a diffuse axonal injury where the nerve cells are stretched and sheared inside the skull. He was out for six hours and then came to momentarily, but he was acting strange. He’s pretty messed up.”

  “Anybody ask him about the accident when he regained consciousness?”

  “I did. I tried to get a statement from him, but he wasn’t capable of coherent thought, never mind speech.”

  “Think he will be?”

  Dougherty shook his head. “I really don’t know—neither do the doctors, I think. They put him back in an induced coma.”

  I nodded and then glanced at Henry, who continued to gaze out the windows. “You file a report with DCI’s Accident Investigation?”

  “I did, and a guy named Novo is coming up tomorrow.”

  The Bear finally joined the conversation. “Mike Novo?”

  “Yeah—you know him?”

  Henry smiled. “He is the motorcycle expert in Cheyenne.”

  I watched Corbin for a moment. “So, what happened?”

  “We got a call from Chloe, a local girl who was working one of the tents up here part time. She was headed home when she saw a guy and a motorcycle lying on the side of the road.”

  “I’m going to need to speak with her.”

  He nodded. “It was about one in the morning on Saturday night, and with the traffic we get around Sturgis, it must’ve just happened. I got there right as the EMTs did, and they scooped him up and took him to Sundance. Herb Robinson, who owns the wrecker service, came and got the bike but then hauled it over to the Rapid City Police Department impound yard. I guess Robinson had past problems with bikers who liberate their bikes without paying, and the Rapid cops are the only ones with a fenced yard.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  The patrolman pushed his empty oatmeal bowl away and rested his elbows on the table. “I think somebody hit him.”

  “Passing him? Rear-ended . . . ?”

  “On purpose.” He stared at me. “The bike was hit on the side, hard, and forced into the ditch. There’s a culvert out there near the turnoff to the Tower—”

  “Yep, we saw it when we stopped.”

  “Right.” There was a pause. “What do you think?”

  “I think you can jump to conclusions in these situations; there are just too many possibilities. Maybe it was a deer, the other driver was drunk, the kid was on his cell phone. . . .”

  Corbin crossed his arms. “He did have a cell phone.”

  “Was it out?”

  “His brains were out. . . . Everything was out.”

  I gave him another second. “I’ll need to check the phone.”

  “Sure.”

  Leaning back in my chair, I listened to it squeal and finished my coffee. “So . . . why call us?”

  “I guess this kid is a big deal with the Tre Tre Nomads, a motorcycle gang out of the Southwest, and things just got really weird really fast.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Members of the club were in Sundance already for the rally and strong-armed their way into seeing the kid at the Medical Center, but then he was transferred to Rapid City Regional and I guess they wouldn’t let them in the intensive care unit. When I got back up here on Sunday, they were waiting for me at the police station.”

  “What’d they want?”

  “They wanted to know who did it, who hit B-way.” He shook his head and swirled the coffee left in his cup. “They said there was no way that he’d just had an accident, and they wanted a name.” He leaned in. “I checked, and you know what? They’re right. He’s never had a traffic accident—everything else under the sun but not even a speeding ticket.”

  “Well, maybe they’re just worried about the kid.”

  “No, it’s more than that. I’m staying at one of the little cabins the city provides on the north end of town, and when I got through on patrol yesterday, one of them was waiting for me there.”

  “Okay.”

  “Big guy, kind of the enforcer, I guess.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  “Wanted to know where we were on all this, what we were doing about it, and I told him that we were doing the best we could, but with the rally we didn’t have the manpower to do a thorough investigation without help from DCI, but that they would be here pretty quick.”

  “And was he satisfied with that?”

  “Not really.” He studied me. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Shoot.”

  “What’s the one percent mean?” He shoved his empty cup away. “When the enforcer, the strong-arm guy, said I better find out who did it, he said I better or I was going to meet the real one percent.”

  I nodded, allowing the information to surface in my memory. “The Hollister riot in ’47. It was just a little after World War II, and they had this motorcycle rally in California in this little town. A lot more bikers showed up than they had anticipated.”

  “And there were riots?”

  “Not really, but there were a lot of drunk bikers and racing in the streets. Things got out of hand. Hollister had only a nine-man police department, and they panicked and threatened to use tear gas and it got in all the newspapers.” Somebody squeezed in near our table as I tried to remember the wording. “I think it was the American Motorcycle Association that came out and said the trouble was caused by the one percent deviants . . .”

  “. . . that tarnish the public image of both motorcycles and motorcyclists.” I looked up to see a man in a leather vest, jeans, and motorcycle boots. “And that the other ninety-nine percent of motorcyclists are good, decent, law-abiding citizens.” He slipped off his Oakley sunglasses, revealing what looked like a once-broken nose, and smiled down at Dougherty through a prodigious mustache and goatee. “The AMA came out later and said they never made the statement, but that’s bullshit.”

  I picked up my coffee cup, studied the dregs, and then him, noting the do-rag under his reversed ball cap, his numerous earrings, and enough tattoos to print up a crew of merchant marines. “Hi.”

  He reluctantly averted his eyes from Corbin to me. “Hi.”

  “Were you there?”

  He looked confused. “Huh?”

  “Hollister.”

  He breathed a laugh. “No, bud, before my time. You?”

  “Before mine, too.”

  He nodded. “Excuse me, but you mind if I continue my conversation with Officer Dougherty here?”

  “Yep, I do. We’re eating
our breakfast, and we don’t like being disturbed. Now, if you’ve got something you’d like to discuss, we’ll be through with our meal here in a few minutes and will meet you out front.”

  He stared at me for a good long time, but I picked up my water glass and just kept drinking as he simmered. “Who the fuck are you?”

  I finally set my glass down and stood, my size taking him a little by surprise. He was big—not quite as big as me—but he was younger, probably in his late thirties and built like a strong safety.

  His hand dropped to the side toward the small of his back, at which point the Cheyenne Nation also stood, that move immediately getting his attention. As an aging offensive tackle, I was just as glad to have my running back with me.

  I leaned in. “How ’bout we make our introductions outside?”

  He hard-eyed Henry for a moment and then, curving the corners of his mouth underneath his mustache, looked back at me. “I’ll see you out front, bud.”

  I watched him leave, and we sat back down. I smiled at Corbin. “That him—the Enforcer?”

  “Yeah, that’s him.”

  We sat there for a while longer, but it seemed as if the conversation had fled the room, so I stood again. “What do you say we go out front?”

  Corbin shook his head. “I think I’ll change careers—fireman is looking good.”

  I grabbed his shoulder. “C’mon, Deputy Dog.”

  All eyes were on us as we exited the packed restaurant, and I noticed a few people were quickly vacating the area in front of the Ponderosa. I pushed the door open, and as we stepped onto the sidewalk, about a dozen bikers of all shapes and sizes immediately surrounded the three of us.

  The Enforcer was seated on a chromed-out bike, a kind of turquoise in color, his legs crossed with a wrist hanging over one of the grips on his handlebars. “Welcome to my office.”

  “Nice view.”

  He shrugged as the others stepped back, letting him make his play. He was the alpha, and if he could handle us on his own, he would.

  “Now, how can we help you?”