I looked down at the letter lying on the center console; the postmark was from a week ago, and the return address was Gillette, in the Iron Horse Subdivision, which was located on the other side of the rumbling coal cars. Gillette was in Campbell County, technically out of my jurisdiction as the Absaroka County sheriff.
My daughter was having a baby in a matter of days, and I was supposed to be visiting her in Philadelphia; instead, I was here, helping Lucian resolve his debt to a dead man.
A barely audible whine keened from the backseat, and I reached around and ruffled the fur behind Dog’s ears. The combination St. Bernard/German shepherd/dire wolf glanced at Lucian. The brim of my mentor’s hat was pressed against the crown of his forehead, making it seem as if he was galloping at high speed like some soul-damned ghost rider in the sky.
I thought about how easy it would be to just throw the big three-quarter-ton into reverse and back out, turn around, and take Route 14/16 back up to the Gillette airport to jump on a plane, but they likely wouldn’t allow Dog, so that was out.
Wondering what it was I was doing here, other than playing the role of chauffeur, I leaned back into my leather seat and felt the pressure of my Colt 1911. “Maybe they’ll have this talk, and then we’ll turn around and go home.”
I looked at Dog again, but he didn’t seem convinced.
Turning back and watching the old sheriff stare at the train, I sighed. “Yep, me neither.”
Pulling the collar of my sheepskin coat a little tighter and cranking my hat down so that it didn’t follow the train to Oregon, I pulled the handle on my door and slid my boots to the gravel surface. I crunched around to the front of the Bullet to lean on the grille guard with him. I spoke loudly, in the field voice my father had never let me use in the house, just to be heard above the endless procession of open cars and the bells that hammered their warning. “They still do.”
He studied me with a clinched eyeball and said nothing, puffing on his pipe like he was pulling the mile of coal himself.
“Find bodies in the hopper cars.”
The ass end of the train went by, another disappointment in that it was not a caboose but rather a set of locomotives helping to push from the rear, and I got that familiar feeling I always did whenever a train passed; that I should be on it, but it was going the wrong way.
Suddenly the bony arms of the crossing gates rose, and the incessant clanging stopped. We listened to the wind for a while, and then the old man beat his pipe empty on the hard surface of the grille guard, unintentionally repeating the coda of the claxons. “Hard times.”
With this singular pronouncement he turned and climbed back in, leaving me watching the skies peeled back in folds of gray, darker and darker to the horizon.
He honked the horn behind me.
—
Flakes were streaking in the wind like bad reception as we pulled up to the house, an unassuming one, one that you’d drive right by, thinking that there must be happy people inside—at least that’s the way I liked to think.
We both sat there, dreading what was coming.
He cleared his throat and started to say something.
“What?”
Gazing out the side window at a deflated Santa Claus that looked as if it might’ve overimbibed in holiday festivities, he grumbled, “Boom or bust.”
“What?”
“Oil, natural gas, and coal; they used to have bumper stickers over here that read CAMPBELL COUNTY—GIVE US ONE MORE BOOM AND WE WON’T SCREW IT UP.” He continued to study the Santa, looking even more like it might’ve arrived in the bottom of a train car. “Used to see a woman here back in the day; used to drive over here on Sundays. She lived alone in this big old house and had money—used to like spending it on me. Never saw her out on the town, never mentioned other men, never bothered me calling or anything like that and was always glad to see me. Whenever we got together we’d end up in motels over in Rapid or up in Billings—we’d mix drinks in this big champagne-gold ’62 Cadillac she had . . .”
“What ever happened to her?”
He stayed like that for a moment, not moving, and then nodded once. “Hell if I know.”
Lucian got out of the truck, and I trudged along after him through the snow that had just started blowing to South Dakota, made a detour into the yard, and reattached the small air compressor to the hose that led to Santa’s boot heel. The jolly old elf rippled on the ground as if trying to crawl away but then slowly grew and stood with an arm raised, a fine patina of coal dust covering his jaunty red suit.
I walked onto the porch where Lucian had rung the bell.
“That your civic duty for the day?”
“Evidently not. Here I am with you when I should be in Philadelphia with Cady.”
Nothing happened so he turned the knob and walked in.
“What are you doing?”
He looked at me still standing on the front porch in the wind and scattered snow. He didn’t say anything but limped off into the house; I had the choice of following him or standing out there freezing my butt off.
I entered, careful to wipe my feet before stepping onto the unusually wide plastic runners that lay on the white carpeting, and, leaning to the side, saw Lucian round a corner past a room divider to go into the kitchen.
I unbuttoned my coat and stuffed my gloves in my pockets and followed, hoping that if somebody got shot it would be him and not me—he was gristly and could take it.
When I got to the kitchen no one was there, only an electric wheelchair parked beside a door open at the far end of the room that led to a basement with one of those fancy stairway elevators that you see in the octogenarian catalogs I’ve been receiving far too often lately.
I reached over and touched the joystick on the spacey-looking wheelchair and it jumped forward, crashing into my leg. “Ouch.” I gently pushed the stick back so that the contraption parked itself in the exact same spot.
Glancing around the kitchen, I was struck by how clean and orderly and white it was—like a museum or somebody’s heaven.
There was a humming sound from the basement and what sounded like typing and, peering down the steps, I could see that lights were on down there, flickering blue ones as if from a couple of televisions.
Easing myself around the track for the chair elevator, I started down the steps—Lucian was sitting on an overstuffed leather sofa and was leafing through a magazine. At the bottom of the stairs, I got a better view of the dimly lit room, which was dominated by three huge flat-screen televisions surrounding a counter with two computer monitors; an older, platinum-haired woman, seated in another wheelchair, raised her hand and waved at me. I took off my hat and waved back.
She smiled and shrugged, her head encased in a massive set of headphones, her eyes redirected to one of the screens and what I could now see was an end-of-the-season football game—Oakland and San Diego.
Stepping around the counter in front of Lucian, I watched as she casually tapped the elongated keys of the stenotype-like machines at her fingertips, belying the speed at which the words were magically appearing up on the closed-captioned portions of the screen.
After a while, with no other recourse, I sat on the sofa with Lucian and waited. There was another door, which must’ve led to another room, but little else. “She does closed captioning for the NFL?”
He flipped another page in the Wyoming Wildlife magazine and glanced up at Phyllis Holman, still tapping away like Morse code. “Football, baseball, hockey . . . you name it, she does it.” His head dropped back to the tips on wild turkey hunting. “Knows more about sports than any man I know.”
“Hi.” She had pulled one of the ear cups back and was looking at me. “Commercial break.”
“Nice to meet you, Mrs. Holman.” I glanced around at all the technology. “Quite a setup you’ve got here.”
She shrugged. “It keeps me occupied.”