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?”
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 resume. 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
