This thank-you was easier.
I took the drive down to Swayback Road to cool off. Along with my better judgment, I took the exit and drove up toward Crazy Woman Canyon past the two fishing reservoirs, Muddy Guard One and Muddy Guard Two. Ah, the colorful contrasts of the Wild West. I spent twenty minutes crawling all over a patched-together ’48 Studebaker pickup trying to find a vehicle identification number that matched any of the ones on paper. After the third number, Mr. Fletcher and I were losing interest, and we settled on the first one, as it was the most legible.
When I got back to town, Ruby informed me that Jules had wandered off. She had spoken with Jim Keller and asked him to bring in Bryan. She had left a message on the answering machine at the Espers and, as of yet, had received no reply. “What time do you want them in here?”
I thought about Omar and the airport, Ernie Brown and the newspaper, and Vern Selby and the courthouse. “Oh, how about five? And call the Espers again; I’d just as soon get this all over with in one shot.”
“Bad choice of words.” She reached for the phone and hit redial.
I walked over to the courthouse and in the back door by the public library. Our courthouse was one of the first built in the territory, which gave the exterior a look of steadfast permanence. The inside, on the other hand, was steadfastly seedy after suffering the indignities of numerous remodelings. Cheap interior paneling, acoustic-tile ceilings, and threadbare green carpeting stretched as far as the fluorescent-lit eye could see. I called it the outhouse of sighs. Vern’s office was on the second floor and, as I swung around the missing newel post and trudged up the steps, I waved at the blue-haired ladies in the assessor’s office down the hall.
I sat on one of Vern’s chairs and waited for him to get off the phone. He was a precise older man, about seventy, who had wispy locks of silver hair that looked like Cecil B. DeMille had stirred them. He was just the kind of person you wanted to look up in the courtroom and see: patrician, calm, and even noble. The fact that he made life and death decisions on peoples’ lives was only slightly diminished by the fact that he never knew what day of the week it was. “Isn’t it Tuesday?”
“Monday, Vern.”
“I guess I lost a day in there somewhere.”
I wondered where, between Sunday and Monday, he had lost it.
He rested his elbows on the desk and carefully placed his chin on his clasped fists. “This Pritchard boy…”
I leaned back in the chair. “Haven’t you heard? That’s not a problem anymore.”
The Norwegian eyes blinked. “I’m thinking that the problems are just beginning.”
I spread my hands. “You know something I don’t?”
No blink. “I’m simply thinking that this unfortunate occurrence may exacerbate some of the hard feelings that resulted from the Little Bird rape case.”
“Exacerbate. Is that a double-word score?” I yawned and relaxed farther into the chair. “And what would you like me to do about this exacerbation?”
Still steady. “Is there any chance of a quick resolution to this situation?”
“I could plead guilty and arrest myself.”
He leaned back in his own chair, and I listened to the soft hiss as the air escaped from the leather padding. My chair didn’t have any padding. I was exacerbated. “Walter, I am sure I do not have to warn you that this case has all the earmarks of blowing up in our faces.” He rested his fingertips on the edge of the desk and sighed. “It was a high-profile case, and there are still a lot of tender feelings both on and off the reservation.” He paused a moment. “Why are you making this difficult for me?”
I slumped a little farther in my chair. “I’m having a bad day.”
“I gathered as much. Does it have to do with the case?”
I shook my head. “Not really.”
“Well, perhaps we should tackle one problem at a time. You’ve talked to the girl’s family?”
I leveled a good look at him. “You aren’t telling me how to do my job, are you Vern?” He raised his hands in surrender. We looked at each other for a while. “Lonnie Little Bird is a diabetic and had both legs amputated. I figure that moves him pretty far down the list of suspects.” We looked at each other some more. “He was the one that sat in the aisle in the wheelchair during the rape trial.”
He shook his head slightly and dismissed me with a wave. “We’ll talk on Wednesday.”
As I left, I cleared the air. “That’d be the Wednesday after tomorrow, Vern?”
It was getting close to four, so I drove up to the airport. I figured Omar would be early; he always was. The local airport was famous for the Jet Festival, which celebrated an event that had taken place back in the early eighties when a Western Airlines 737 had mistaken our airport for Sheridan’s and had slid that big son of a gun to a record-breaking stop in only forty-five hundred feet. The town celebrated the avionic miracle by throwing a big party. They invited the pilot, Edger Lowell, every year. Every year, he declined. We never were made a hub, but we still got our share of polo players, dudes, wealthy executives, and big game hunters. The polo players come because of the Equestrian Center; the dudes come to play cowboy for a couple of thousand a week; the executives, to escape a world they had helped create; and the big game hunters, they come for Omar. So far, none of them had gotten him, but it wasn’t for a lack of trying.
Omar was a local enigma, the big dog of outfitters along the Bighorns. You could run the entire length of the range along the mountains and ownership would concede seven names, one of which was Omar Rhoades. His ranch followed the north fork of Rock Creek at the top of the county, stretched from I-90 to the Cloud Peak Wilderness Area, and was about half the size of Rhode Island. He was originally from Indiana and had inherited the place from a rich uncle who had despised the rest of the family. Omar knew everything there was to know about hunting and firearms. His personal collection was known worldwide, and the number of international hunters he wooed as a clientele was legion. He had his own airport on the ranch, but after the FAA had curtailed the size of his landing strip, the hunters that arrived in larger aircraft landed here.
I pulled through the chain-link fence and parked alongside the control tower. Old concrete pads patched with asphalt stretched across the flat surface of the bluff, and a frayed windsock popped in the strong breeze. I walked past the white cinder block building, which proclaimed DURANT, WYOMING, ELEVATION 4954; I guess they felt compelled to put the state on there just in case somebody really got lost. I had a great affinity for the few old Lockheed PV-2s parked along the end of the runway that dwarfed the three Cessna 150s chained to the tarmac in front of the building. There were no contracts for the naked aluminum birds, and they sat there with their cowlings and nose cones becoming a flatter and flatter red. The Pratt and Whitney engines slowly seeped aviation grade oil on the concrete, and the Bureau of Forestry decals had begun to peel away. At the end of the building, I looked down the flight way and saw what I was looking for: George Armstrong Custer leaning against a custom crew cab.
To say that he looked like the General was partly slighting to Omar; Omar was better looking and, I’m sure, a head taller than Ol’ Goldilocks. A carefully battered silver-belly Stetson sloped off his head, and his arms were folded into a full-length Hudson blanket coat with a silver-coyote collar. The locals considered him to be quite the dandy, but I figured he just had style. We had gotten to know each other through a lengthy series of domestic disturbances. Omar and his wife Myra had attempted to kill each other in an escalating process of more than eight years that had started out with kitchen utensils and ended, as far as I was concerned, with a matching set of. 308s that had been a wedding gift from the uncle. They were both crack shots and incredibly lucky that they had missed; they could live neither with nor without each other. At the moment, they were living without, and things had become considerably quieter on Rock Creek. He always looked like he was asleep, and he never was.
“So, if a man wanted to kill an innocent animal around here, what would he do?”
“Move. There isn’t any such thing as an innocent animal, especially around here.”
I leaned against the shiny surface of the Chevrolet and wondered how he kept all his vehicles so clean. He probably had about twelve guys on the job. “Didn’t you watch the Walt Disney Hour on television?”
“I was more partial to Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. ” He yawned and tipped his hat back. His cobalt eyes squeezed the distance to the mountains, and you could almost hear the clicking of his internal scopes as they measured the yards and calculated the trajectory. “Anyway, the animal you’re looking for is about as far from innocent as you can get.”
I pulled the plastic bag from my coat and held it up in front of him. It looked like a Rorschach test in lead. “Which brings me to the point at hand.” His eyes shifted to the Ziploc, and he looked more like a lion than anything else.
