She nodded. “DCI ran every test they had and guess what?” He waited. “They’re sleeping pills.” She glanced back at the computer screen as a couple frolicked on a beach at sunset. “The only effect that most people notice is a bitter, metallic taste in the mouth called dysgeusia.” She considered me, with her head slightly cocked. “Do you believe they have a fucking scientific term for bitter metallic taste?”
I nodded. “We used to just call it fear.”
“Five to ten minutes after dosing, you get the taste.” She threw a chin toward the computer screen. “Ten to fifteen minutes and you’re out, REM sleep within the hour.”
“Can you OD on it?”
“Oh, yeah. Anything more than about thirty-six milligrams and you’re looking at an activated charcoal cocktail or the pump, and you’re also likely looking at renal or liver damage; then, depending on that damage, you go to operation bank account.”
“Which is?”
“Going through pockets for loose change.”
I sighed.
“There is one important note concerning our case though, and that is that the medication is for temporary usage.” She stared at me. “Sleeping Beauty’s been using this stuff for almost two years. Who knows how much of this crap is backed up in her system or what effect it has.”
“Illegal use?”
“There’s a small niche in the drug culture of addicts that use the stuff since it’s DEA Schedule IV and easy to get. They use it for the come-down phase after cocaine, meth, LSD, MDMA, and all the ‘upper’ drugs. ADD and ADHD patients use the stuff to come down after spending the day on amphetamine variants.” She pointed at the screen as the happy actors collapsed in giant feather beds, surrounded by huge, sleepily floating butterflies hovering over them. All in all, it was kind of creepy. “Do you believe this crap? I mean, if you’re to the point of drugging yourself into a stupor to go to sleep at night, you’re probably not leading an idyllic life.”
“An extra Rainier usually works for me.”
I started to get up, but she swung her chair around, hooked the aforementioned naked calves behind my legs, and pulled herself in close, grasping my thighs with her capable hands. “I usually rely on hot, sweaty, jungle monkey sex.” She leaned in, and our noses were about eight inches apart. “Works every time.”
I didn’t move. “I hear that can be very addictive, too.”
Her face grew closer, and her voice lowered to a rough whisper. “Oh, yeah.”
“I’m still thinking about going out to Absalom.”
She leaned in, even closer than before. “You know, I think we’re developing an unhealthy pattern here. Every time I talk about the job, you talk about sex, and every time I talk about sex, you talk about the job.” I watched as the smile hollowed under her cheekbones and traced her grin.
“Kind of a passive-aggressive thing?”
I could feel her hands running up and down my thighs, building heat. “I’m okay with either, and I have my own handcuffs.” I leaned back in my chair and broke the spell as she looked at me. “What?”
I took a breath. “I’ve got a question for you, a serious one.”
“Okay.”
“Do you want to be sheriff in two years?”
She leaned back in her own chair and thought about it. “This is a serious offer?”
“Yep.”
She took a breath and studied me with a hard look. “Why are you asking me this now?”
It was a fair question, but I’d been giving the election considerable thought. “Well, the vote is next month and up to now I’ve only put in a halfhearted attempt.”
She smiled at me with that oversized canine tooth. “Seems to me you’re giving everything a halfhearted attempt.” She dropped her legs. “What, you worried you’re not going to get reelected?”
It was my turn to take a breath. “We’re not talking about me.” I slowly let it out. “We’re talking about you.”
Her eyes went down to her hands, which still held my knees. “Look
… I know my limitations.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’m not an administrator.”
I shrugged. “Neither am I; that’s why I have Ruby.”
“I won’t have that luxury because as soon as you retire, she’ll leave skid marks.” She looked around the room as if the staff had suddenly assembled and then departed. “They’ll all leave, and I’ll be sitting in this fucking mausoleum alone.”
“I think you might be underestimating yourself.”
“Really?” Her head nodded in emphasis, the way it did when she had more to say than one mouth would allow. “The Ferg is, for all intents and purposes, retired. Double Tough will bail as soon as one of these methane outfits offers him sixty thousand a year. Frymire, the international man of mystery-who the fuck knows what Frymire is going to do? And Saizarbitoria? You think he’s going to be happy being a deputy for the rest of his life?”
“He just switched over from corrections-he’s not ready to be a sheriff.”
“He will be in two years.”
“Maybe not.” I wanted to put a little more distance between us, so I contemplated the books on her shelves and the one space left for the light switch. “Does the Basquo seem a little odd to you lately?”
Her head inclined. “In what way?”
“Since he got stabbed?”
She thought about it. “Maybe a little. He’s quieter-why?” “I’ve been trying to work him back on the duty roster, but he’s not showing a great deal of enthusiasm.”
She sighed. “Well, he lost a kidney, so maybe he’s got a right to a little bullet fever.” She leaned back, cocked an elbow on her armrest, and placed a fingernail that matched her toes between her teeth. “And you?”
“What about me?”
“I’m going back to the original subject of this fucking conversation. Are you going to be my deputy if I’m sheriff?”
I leaned forward and took her finger out of her mouth and put my hands over hers. “Like I said before, we’re not talking about me, we’re talking about you.”
“I asked you a very simple question.”
I didn’t answer, and she’d nodded some more. “That’s what I thought.”
October 28, 7:25 P.M.
Bill dropped Dog and me off at my rental car and said he’d see us later this evening at the fights. I drove the lonely gravel road back toward Absalom. A fantail of ochre dust plumed twenty feet tall behind me before it was lifted by the prevalent wind and carried off toward Twentymile Butte and the Battlement. The two-hundred-foot front face of the topographical landmark stood like some sort of Powder River Monte Cassino along the wide valley of Wild Horse Creek, which reflected the autumnal glow as the scoria shone like carved platinum.
When I was about Benjamin’s age, I’d read Edgar Rice Bur-roughs’s Lost World in the back bedroom of the ranch house we’d just been surveying and had secretly suspected that dinosaurs roamed the elevated and unapproachable twenty square miles that I saw almost every day. I was right in a sense but wrong in a chronology that was off by a couple of million years.
The college in Sheridan had had a dig up on the butte where they had found the intact, fossilized skeleton of not a dinosaur but a birdlike creature about eight feet tall. I’d seen the Diatryma in the museum over there and had dutifully read the little brass plaque that had labeled it as one of the dominant predators of the Eocene period, when Wyoming had been a dense jungle of subtropical climate at the edge of a western interior seaway.
Geologically, I’m sure there was a lot that had gone on there since then, but socially I don’t think much had happened. There were the occasional antelope and plenty of modern birds that made their homes in the rock, but the plateau was too high and the wind too forceful to allow for cattle grazing, and there wasn’t much to hunt, so not many people made the trip.
There was a new road where an energy exploration firm had tested for gas and oil, and which might have
