“Why would I make up a story?” Joe said. “Look around you, McLanahan. We’re in a hospital. These injuries are real. Do you think I wanted to be here?”
“It ain’t so bad,” he said. “I seen some of the nurses.”
“I need to talk to Sheriff Baird,” Joe said. “I need to hear this from him myself.”
“Feel free. He should be down into town tomorrow or the next day. I’m sure he’d love to talk with you, too. This search they just been on wiped out most of his discretionary budget for the rest of the year, payin’ all those men to go up that mountain to find a whole lot of nothing. Yes, Baird is a pretty crabby man right now.”
Joe wasn’t sure what to say. The news had taken the wind out of him.
“Well,” McLanahan said as
McLanahan stood and clamped on his hat. His eyes sparkled. Joe realized how much McLanahan hated him for closing cases in the sheriff’s jurisdiction without involving his department. He remembered how angry the sheriff had been when Governor Rulon asked him to get out of the way two years before. He’d harbored his bitterness and could now unleash it.
“Look,” Joe said, “I’ll talk with Baird and the DCI when I can and try to figure out where they went wrong up there. It doesn’t make any sense, unless the Grim Brothers were able to wipe out all the evidence. I wouldn’t put it past them.”
“Yeah,” McLanahan said, smiling contemptuously beneath his mustache, “according to your statement they seem larger than life itself! Like supermen of the mountains. You shoot ’em in the face and in the chest and they still keep coming, like . . .
Which made Sollis laugh out loud.
“What are you saying?” Joe asked. “That I put myself in here for some reason and made it all up?”
McLanahan raised his hand and formed a pistol with his fist and fired it at Joe. “Bingo,” he said.
Joe shook his head, stunned.
“Do you remember a deputy I had once named Hayder?” the sheriff asked. At the sound of the name, Sollis rolled his eyes. Joe said nothing.
“Well, Ol’ Hayder was in his cruiser one night up on Bighorn Road. Somebody had reported high school kids drag racing up and down that road, so dispatch sent him up there to find out what was going on. He hid his unit in a bunch of trees and waited, hour after hour, for some of them speed demons to show up so he could make an arrest and get out of my doghouse. But he got real bored, because there was nothin’ happening, so he started fiddling around with his Taser. I don’t know what the hell he was thinkin’, but somehow he shot himself with it. Right in the neck!”
Sollis went, “Ha-ha-ha,” and wiped at the nonexistent tears in his eyes, even though he’d likely heard the story a dozen times.
McLanahan continued, “Well, if you’ve ever been hit by a Taser, you know what it can do to your bodily functions when that current goes through you, and Ol’ Hayder soiled his pants. He threw the door open and rolled around on the ground outside the car with muscle spasms. When he finally recovered, he was too damned embarrassed to tell anyone at the department what had happened, so he made up a crazy story about being jumped by three bikers who he claimed ambushed him and got his Taser out of his belt and used it on him while he bravely fought them off. He even named a couple of lowlifes in town we’d been after for a while as the assailants, and we had them arrested. Hayder almost got away with it, too, except one of those drag-racing kids had seen the whole thing and videoed it with his cell phone camera. It seems the speed demons knew all about Hayder in those trees, so they were gonna sneak up on him and slash his tires or some other kind of damned kid prank. The kid who took the video got picked up for careless driving a few days later and told Sollis here he’d show him something if we’d throw away the ticket. He got his phone out and we watched it and busted a gut. Ol’ Hayder didn’t show up for work the next day, and we ain’t seen him since.”
Joe said nothing.
“So what I’m sayin’,” McLanahan finished as he paused at the door, “is I can see a scenario where maybe you was intoxicated on liquor or your own ego and you dropped your shotgun. It went off, peppering your shoulder and neck. Your horses reared and dumped you and you injured your leg. I’m thinkin’ maybe you landed on a downed log and a sharp branch stuck through your thigh. Then the horses ran off and left you there with nothin’ at all. So being the big-shot celebrity you are in the middle of nowhere, you didn’t want to tell the governor what happened, so you made up one hell of a good story.”
“Get out,” Joe said. “You’re a damned idiot and an embarrassment.”
McLanahan’s eyes flashed and he started to come out of his chair. Joe didn’t back down. McLanahan apparently thought better of getting into a fistfight with a man in a hospital bed and said, “The easiest way to eat crow is while it’s warm. The colder it gets, the harder it is to swaller.”
Joe said, “It’s hard to believe the West was won with stupid sayings like that.”
“The only thing I don’t like about this whole deal,” McLanahan said, ignoring Joe, “is that I understand you’re coming back to Saddlestring. Everything else, though, just tickles me to no end.”
“Let me give you some of your own cornpone advice,” Joe said. “Never miss a chance to shut up. Now get out.”
“And give my best to the lovely Mrs. Pickett.”
AS A RESULT OF MCLANAHAN’S VISIT, Joe gripped the railings of his bed with both hands and stared at the blank screen of the television. There, he saw a distorted reflection of himself at what looked like the edge of an abyss.
How was it possible a team of eleven men couldn’t confirm his story? Where had the Grim Brothers gone? Was it possible they’d never been there at all? That everything Joe recalled was some kind of a fever dream?
A phone burred on a stand next to his bed. Until it rang, he hadn’t known there was a telephone there.
A crisp female voice said, “Hold for Governor Rulon.”
