“Sure.”
She took her hat and started for the door.
“Hey, Inez?” She stopped when she heard Henry’s voice but didn’t turn. “Be good, because I will be watching.”
She nodded solemnly, but she didn’t say anything as she opened the door and escaped.
Henry looked after her. “Rarely do you see the promise of a man in a boy, but you almost always see the threat of a woman in a girl-and sometimes the threat is not hollow.”
“She’s young.”
“Not that young.”
I tipped my hat back down. “Well, that was an interesting departure from the good-cop/bad-cop-the good- cowboy/bad-Indian.”
He sighed. “Her family has a history of playing hand games. I knew I could count on her sportsmanship, if not her honor.”
He easily evaded me when I attempted to slap the ball from under his arm.
“You never did have the guts to play in the paint, Henry.”
He laughed.
The agent in charge was standing by Rezdawg when we got outside, along with two other agents, one still in the Crown Vic and the other examining Henry’s truck, probably wondering if it ran.
“So, do I have to go talk to Inez Two Two, or have you done my work for me?”
I walked over and stopped, laying an arm on the bed of the truck. “I didn’t know you guys worked on Sundays.”
He slipped off his sunglasses, and we both looked around at the gorgeous day. “Neither rain, nor snow…”
“That’s the postal service.” I thought about it and quoted. “Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these courageous couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.”
“Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the whole thing.”
I nodded. “They stole it from Herodotus, about 500 B.C. during the Greek/Persian war-he said it about the Persian mounted postal couriers.”
He shook his head in disbelief. “Are you sure you’re a sheriff?”
I ignored the remark and joined him, tipping my hat back and absorbing the warmth of the sun. “Hey, you don’t happen to have a copy of the phone recordings between Artie and Clarence on you, do you?”
He gave a small laugh. “Those recordings are FBI property.”
“You don’t have a copy?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“How ’bout we trade you what Inez said for a copy of the recording.”
He lounged against the scaly surface of Henry’s truck. “Not a good enough trade. I can always just go inside and question the girl myself.”
“You might not get anything; she’s tough.” I gestured toward the Bear. “And you don’t have an Indian scout.”
Henry spun the basketball in his hands and glanced up at the outside hoop about thirty feet away. “I will play you for it.”
The agent in charge’s head came down, and he smiled at the Cheyenne Nation. “As much as I’d like to, I don’t have time.”
“Three letters.”
Cliff Cly studied my friend for a moment, and then a broad grin spread across his face. He ceremoniously pushed away from the truck and then carefully took off his jacket, folded it, and placed it on the side of the bed and began loosening his tie. “I should probably warn you that I played JV ball at Rutgers.”
Henry looked impressed. “Wow.”
Rolling up the sleeves on his dress shirt, the FBI AIC paused. “Do I get to pick the three letters?”
The Bear dribbled the ball once, and then held it, his dark eyes studying the federal agent. “Funny, I was thinking A-I-M.”
10
“Rutgers must have been really shitty that year.”
He smiled to himself as we bumped along in Rezdawg, whose top speed today was, evidently, fifty-two miles an hour.
I held the CD in my hand and studied the broken AM radio with its cracked glass and missing buttons, the optic orange indicator frozen permanently at the bottom of the dial. “Have I told you lately just how much I hate this truck?” I sighed, and popped the CD back into its paper envelope. “What do you know about this Amish boot maker?”
“He makes really good boots.”
“Other than that.”
“He supposedly got into trouble for his tastes in women.”
“He married an Indian?”
“He did. In many ways, Levi Stoltzfus is doing his part for the integration of the high plains races.” He coaxed the truck off the rumble strip and back into the center of the lane with a movement that would’ve sent any other vehicle slashing into the opposite ditch. Rezdawg considered the movements of the steering wheel in Henry’s hands as mild suggestions. “To his credit, he just loaded up his boot shop and moved on down the Tongue River to Birney.”
“White Birney?”
“No, Red Birney; once you have gone red, you cannot get it out of your head.”
We took a meandering right onto a dirt road just before the Tongue River and followed the dusty track for a good half mile before Henry urged Rezdawg to a stop, then threw the gearshift into reverse and backed up fifty yards with the transmission sounding as if it was going to fall out onto the roadway.
The truck stumbled to a stop, and the Bear pointed at a crooked ranch gate with words chiseled into the overhead log-STOLTZFUS WORLD FAMOUS BOOTS.
I pivoted to take in the empty road and hillsides and then turned to look back at my buddy. “Hard to be world famous ’round these parts.”
“Give the people quality, and they will beat a path to your door.”
I guessed. “F. W. Woolworth.”
He shook his head.
“S. S. Kresge?”
He shook his head again at my listing of defunct five-and-dimes and spun the wheel several times to get the front tires to turn. “Actually, it was the Kinks.”
The road was deeply rutted and wound around a tall knob of rocks to our right, then straightened into a washboard that leveled off into a low-slung building that must’ve been built around the same time as the original Small Song structure back in the forties. There was a house farther up the hill and a large garden where a Native woman was picking vegetables with two small children.
Henry parked near the shop; again he turned the wheels so that if Rezdawg decided to go on an unscheduled sojourn, it wouldn’t be a long one.
There was a pinsized stream of antifreeze arcing from the radiator that I didn’t see until I walked in front of the vehicle and it sprayed on me. I jumped away and wiped the excess down my jeans and clenched a fist as if to strike the grille guard. “I really hate this truck.”
“Yes. So you have told me.”
I dropped my fist and followed Henry toward the front porch when the woman called from the edge of some tacked-together sheep fence on the hill. “Are you here about your boots?”
