Death Without Company Read online

  “Dena go to that pool tournament in Vegas?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”

  “I have not yet decided.”

  It felt good there with that strange feeling of being in a public place without the public. I was going to have to call and check in, but it was still early on a Sunday, our slowest day of the week. I was avoiding it, mostly because I would get caught talking to Lucian. He had a few strange ideas about some goings on out at the Durant Home for Assisted Living and had become a kind of Absaroka County Agatha Christie. I told him that if anybody shortened the span of any of the occupants they wouldn’t be robbing them of all that much, and he reminded me that he would be happy to take me by my mutilated, half-century old ear and march me around the block. Ever since I had hired the retired sheriff as a part-time dispatcher on weekends, he had been gathering his salt.

  I looked out through the haloed light of a high-plains winter at the falling snow with flakes the size of poker chips. I had had inclinations that it was going to be a winter to remember, and so far I had been right. The day before Thanksgiving, Cady had been trapped at the Philadelphia airport; she had been trying to get back to Wyoming for a surprise visit. I hadn’t been feeling well and, after getting through one of the toughest cases of my life, she could tell. Cady had called, filled with tears and frustrated fury at a two-fold snowstorm that had grounded planes on both the eastern seaboard and in Denver, the hub to our part of the world. They had assured her that even if she did make it there, she would be spending the holiday at DIA. We talked for an hour and forty-two minutes. She was laughing that heartfelt laugh of hers by the time we were done, the one that matched her deep rustic voice, and I felt better.

  “Dena says she is moving to Las Vegas.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  The coffee was done, so I pulled the sleeping bag up a little higher on my shoulders and towed it over to the bar with me; I must have looked like a giant praying mantis. I poured myself a cup and got the heavy cream the Bear kept in the bar refrigerator. I added the cream to his and dumped in what I considered a reasonable amount of sugar, dropped a spoon in, and carried it over to him; I figured the least he could do was stir the thing himself. I handed him the Sturgis mug and sat back down. “Things could be worse.”

  “And how is that?”

  I took a sip of my coffee for dramatic effect. “You could have been dating a murderer.” I watched as the big shoulders shifted, and he stared at me. It felt wrong, saying it like that. It was disrespectful of somebody I still cared a great deal about. “I guess everybody’s a little nervous about talking to me, huh?”

  His eyes were steady. “Yes.”

  “I’m okay.” He didn’t say anything. “I am.”

  “Yes.”

  I shook my head and looked at the stove. It was warming up a little in our corner of the world, so I shrugged the bag down off my shoulders. “Are you going to say anything in this conversation besides yes?” I quickly added. “Don’t answer that.”

  The wind pushed against the wooden sides of the old Sinclair station that Henry Standing Bear had converted into the Red Pony bar. We were on the border of the Rez, and the wind was older here. I listened to the voices of the Old Cheyenne as they screamed from the northwest and disappeared toward the Black Hills. I had had some delusionary episodes during the first really big snowstorm of the season, at least that’s what I had decided to label them, but I kind of missed the Old Cheyenne. They weren’t all I missed. I let the bitter taste of the coffee hold there in my mouth for a second. It wasn’t anybody’s fault; I was running under radio silence. My friends had spared me the crippling depth charges of understanding and, worse yet, advice, but I was going to have to come up for air; Henry was a good place to start.

  “I don’t think I’m going to date anymore.”

  “Yes.” He took a sip of his coffee and nodded along with me. “It is not like women are any fun to be around, that they are soft, that they smell good, or that they . . .”

  “Shut up.”

  He nodded some more. “Yes.”

  We had a wide-ranging conversation about Vonnie; we talked about love, fate, and everybody’s inability to truly leave the past behind. It had been an ugly little case with two young men and one beautiful woman dead and, after four years of self-pronounced isolation, I had gotten my head and heart handed to me.

  All Henry had said was yes. I guess that’s when the valves opened, all the used air expended into the atmosphere, and all the fresh poured in. He made me run in the snow later that afternoon, and I have to admit that it felt pretty good.

  Vic got two more and added Dan Crawford to the list for good measure. She handed me the clipboard after she had climbed in and shut the truck door. “Here, His Majesty’s dutiful servants for the day.” She leaned forward, and I watched as her slender neck tilted to look through the top of the windshield at the stony clouds that were bricking away the sky.

  “What’re your plans for tonight?”

  She looked at me, and I noticed the small, etched, smile lines at the corners of her mouth. “Why?”

  “You wanna go over and visit Lucian with me?”

  The little lines quickly disappeared. “I’m washing my hair.”

  “He always asks about you.”

  “He always asks about my tits.”

  I did have ulterior motives. With her along the previous Tuesday, Lucian had been so distracted that I had won every game. “Maybe you should look at it as a visit to Pappy Van Winkle?” The only thing I really had going for me in persuading her to come was her taste in expensive bourbon, which was in ready supply in Room 32 at the Durant Home for Assisted Living.

  “I can buy my own bourbon and not have to be ogled by that fucking old pervert.” She shifted her weight and fastened her seatbelt. “I’ve got to tell you, as nights on the town go? That one was pretty lame. I haven’t had a time like that since my grandfather took me to a vacant lot on South Street to drink wine and play bocce ball with his cronies.” She looked at me. “I was six and a shrewd judge of a good time.”

  The little lines reappeared as she laid an arm along the door and looked out across the hood of the Bullet. I glanced down at the hand resting on her leg and noticed that she wasn’t wearing her wedding band anymore. She and Glen had come to a parting of the ways back in November; he had gone to Alaska, and Vic was still here, thank God. She had turned down respective offers to flaunt her honor, service, and integrity with the Philadelphia Police Department, where she had worked before, and the Department of Justice’s Federal Bureau of Investigation. She was that good. Instead, she was the under-sheriff of the least populated county in the least populated state in the union, with an option to have my job come November.

  I blinked, refocused, and became aware that she was looking at me. “What?”

  “I asked how you were doing these days.”

  “Good.”

  She waited. “You know I am available on a professional consulting basis for fucked-up relationships, right?”

  “I’ve got your card.”

  By the time we got to the office behind the courthouse, the smallest traces of snow had begun drifting down in a nonchalant manner. This one thought it could fool us by starting out slowly. There were times in Wyoming when you needed to know where to park your car so you could find it in the morning.

  I followed Vic and paused to scan my doorway for Post-its as she stopped and gathered her mail from Ruby’s desk. The dog raised his eyes, looked between the two of us, and then settled the five-gallon bucket-head back on his paws.

  Vic nodded as she shuffled through her mail. “Yeah, I’d keep a low profile if I was you too, shit head.”

  I had inherited Ruby from Lucian. Fierce as a bobcat and as loyal as the Swiss, she kept a neon blue eye toward my moral development. She was sixty-five, going on thirty. I cut in quickly, before the real fighting started. “Post-its?”
r />   Ruby continued to pet Dog. “Somebody dumped a bunch of garbage and an old refrigerator out at Healey Reservoir.”

  “Let me guess who found that.” Our resident fisherman and part-time deputy, the Ferg, kept us up to date on all the fishing holes in the vicinity.

  “He says they left some of their mail in the garbage bags, so he’s gone over to the trailer park near the bypass to have a little chat with the suspected offenders. Oh, Rawlins called to confirm his interview tomorrow.”

  “The Mexican kid?”

  She turned. “He doesn’t sound Mexican.”

  “What does he sound like?”

  “Just different.” She went back to her screen. “Lucian called to make sure you were going to be there tonight. Are you being mean to him? He usually doesn’t call to confirm chess night.”

  I picked up some of the general delivery stuff, flipped through the latest police garment catalog, and thought about replacing my duty coveralls. “He’s been weird lately.”

  “How?”

  I decided to keep my old pair and closed the catalog. “Just odd, like he’s got something on his mind.” I tossed it into the wire wastebasket and started toward my office. “Does that kid know that it’s going to snow ass deep to a nine-foot Indian tonight?”

  Her eyes drifted up to look at me over the computer screen. “Does your Native American friend know you use such descriptive terms?”

  I paused at my doorway. “Where do you think I get ’em?”

  “Where is the Bear these days?”

  The women in my life always asked about Henry; it was irritating. “He’s up on the Rez in the basement of some defunct Mennonite church.” I leaned against the doorjamb and thought about what I would do if Ruby ever retired; I would have to retire, too. “They found a couple of old hatboxes full of photographs that the Mennonites must have taken a long time back.”

  “Mennonites on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation?”

  I shrugged with one shoulder. “It didn’t take.”

  “Sounds like a treasure trove.”

  “He’s cataloguing and annotating something like six hundred photographs.

  Her eyes returned to the screen, and the soft tap of the keyboard resumed. “That should keep him out of trouble for a while.”

  I missed Henry but figured he’d get back in touch when he got the chance. He was like a warm Chinook that blew in when you least expected it. I scratched my beard. “Anything else?”

  Her eyes returned to the screen. “We’re putting together a petition to get you to shave.”

  My desk was relatively clear for a Tuesday, and Santiago Saizarbitoria’s file was on the top of the nearest pile. Santiago Saizarbitoria. What did she think, he was Norwegian? I didn’t think the kid was going to make it, but I had ten minutes of the taxpayer’s time to kill, so I flipped the manila file open and looked down at the cover sheet. I hadn’t ever spoken to him. Ruby had gotten the application via priority mail with a letter of introduction and a résumé. All of the contact since then had been done by e-mail on Ruby’s computer. I didn’t have a computer; they wouldn’t let me have one.

  Vic would be responsible for half of the interview, which would probably resemble revenge for the Inquisition. If the kid was lucky tomorrow, he’d spend the day at the Flying J truck stop in Casper, go home to Rawlins, and continue his career in corrections.

  He was married, and his wife’s name was Maria. They had no children, and his starting salary had been $17,000, 18 percent less than the nationwide average. He was twenty-eight, five feet nine inches, weighed 183 pounds, and had dark hair and eyes. He obviously had a facility with languages; he spoke Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German. I would have to check on his Cheyenne and Crow.

  I flipped to the back page and locked eyes with the two-by-two photo. Swashbuckling. I guess that was the first strong impression that I had of the young man Vic had already tagged as Sancho. He was a handsome kid with a Vandyke that gave him a rakish and mischievous musketeer quality. He was thick and looked strong, although his features were fine. I always concentrate on the eyes, and these were sharp with just a little bit of wayward electricity in them. I had the suspicion that not much got by Sancho and what did was viewed with quiet irony.

  If we were serious about him, we’d have to call Archie, the chief of police in Kemmerer, and then the man who was his supervisor in Rawlins. He had lasted two years in the extreme risk unit in the high security ward at the state’s penitentiary. That told me something. We are for the dark, indeed.

  Whenever I read an application, I always found myself wondering what my answers to the questions would be. What impression would I have of myself, and would I hire me? I hadn’t had to fill out a form when I had gone to work for Lucian: he hadn’t had one.

  We had been sitting at the bar in the lobby of the Euskadi Hotel on Main Street. It was late on a Friday night and Montana Slim sang “Roundup in the Fall” through his nose on the jukebox, and we were the only ones there. Lucian preferred the Euskadi, because the bar didn’t have any video pong games or customers, in that order. It was late October, and I had a new wife and thirty-seven dollars in a checking account.

  “So, you were a cop over there in Vietnam?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I had caught him in midsip. “Don’t call me sir. I ain’t yer daddy, far as we know.” I watched him hold the glass tumbler and look at me from the corner of a webbed apex of sundried wrinkles and the blackest pupils I’d ever seen. He was about the age I am now; I thought he was ancient. “Is it as big a mess over there as I think it is?”

  I thought about it. “Yep, it is.”

  He sipped his bourbon and carefully avoided the wad of chew packed between his lower lip and gum. “Well, ours was probably just as bad. We just didn’t have enough sense to know it.” I nodded, since I didn’t know what else to do. “Seems to me with this Vietnam thing, you get yourself into trouble fifteen thousand miles from home, you’ve got to have been lookin’ for it.” I nodded some more. “Drafted?”

  “Lost my deferment.”

  “What the hell’d you do that for?”

  “Graduated.”

  He placed the cut-glass tumbler back in the small ring of the paper cocktail napkin and nudged it toward Jerry Aranzadi, the bartender, whom I did not know at the time.

  “Where from?”

  I took a sip of my Rainier and hoped my bank account would last through the interview. “University of Southern California.” He didn’t say anything. “It’s in Los Angeles.”

  He nodded silently as Jerry refilled his glass with at least four fingers. “Two things you gotta remember, Troop.” He called me Troop for the next eight years. “A short pencil is better than a long memory, and you get to buy me my chew ’cause I’m a cripple.” The last part of the statement referred to his missing leg, which had been blown off by some Basque bootleggers back in the fifties.

  “What brand?”

  I closed Santiago Saizarbitoria, placed him carefully on the surface of my desk, and made myself the promise to remember the rube kid with the funny haircut who had sat in the Euskadi Hotel bar and wondered what the hell he was going to do if the old man sitting next to him said no.

  “I’m going home.”

  I looked up from the surface of my desk to my deputy. “What’s it doing outside?”

  “Snowing like a bastard.” Despite the fact that she was leaving, she came in, sat down, and folded her jacket on her lap. She nodded toward the file. “Is that Sancho?”

  “Yep. What do you think?”

  She shrugged, “I think that if he’s got a pulse and a pecker, we put him on patrol.” She continued to look at me. “What are you going to do about dinner?”

  “I don’t know, maybe go down to the Bee.” The Busy Bee was in a small concrete-block building that clung to the banks of Clear Creek through the tenacity of its owner and the strength of its biscuits and spiced gravy. Dorothy Caldwell had owned and operated the Bee since Chr
ist had been a cowboy. I ate there frequently and, due to its proximity to the jail, so had our infrequent lodgers.

  “I bet she’s gone home.”

  “I’ll take my chances. If worse comes to worse, I can always catch the pepper steak over at the Home for Assisted Living.”

  She made a face. “That sounds appealing.”

  “Better than a plastic-wrapped burrito from the Kum and Go.”

  “Boy, you know all the hot spots, don’t you?”

  “I have been known to show a girl a good time, yes.”

  After Vic and Ruby had gone, the beast ambled in and sat on my foot. I was second string, but it was still good to be on the team. She was probably right; with the impending storm, Dorothy had most likely headed home for the night. I weighed my options and settled on a chicken potpie from the jail’s resources. Dog followed me as I rummaged through the minirefrigerator and pulled out the freeze de jour. We didn’t have any occupants, so I took my steaming little tin into holding cell 1 and sat down on the bunk with a can of iced tea. Dog curled up at the door and looked at me. I had taught him that begging was all right if it was done from at least six feet away.

  There were no windows so I could ignore the mounting snow outside, but the phone that began ringing, I could not. I sat my half-eaten chicken potpie tin on the bunk and answered the extension on the wall of our kitchenette. “Absaroka County Sheriff ’s Department.”

  “Is this the goddamned sheriff?”

  I recognized the voice. “Maybe.”

  “Well, if you ain’t him then somebody better go out and find the simple-minded son of a bitch and tell him to get his ass over here. I ain’t got all night!” The phone went dead with a loud crack as the cradle on the other end absorbed the impact, and I stood there listening as my potpie was devoured.

  I had talked Lucian into coming on as a part-time dispatcher on weekends, and I think he enjoyed it, but I would be the last one he would tell. He drove the rest of the staff crazy, but Dog liked him and so did I. I took the pie tin and threw it into the trash along with the plastic spork and my empty tea. I headed for the office to grab my coat; Dog followed.