The voice of the Cheyenne Nation came on the line. “I am supposed to ask where you are. Please do not answer with any other location than the City of Brotherly Love.”
“Just got in a cab from the airport.”
Another pause. “There was a car waiting for you, did you not see the man holding the sign with your name on it?”
“Are you kidding? I’m lucky I saw the airport.” I looked around. “Well, I’m in this one. Anyway, I’m on my way to Pennsylvania Hospital, right?”
“Yes, everyone is here.”
“Well . . . Almost everyone, I hope.”
“The only other member of the party is due at 8:20 A.M.”
I nodded into the phone. “Thanks for the reminder.”
“You have two hours to get to the hospital. Do you think you will make it?”
I leaned forward to get the taxi driver’s attention. “How long to Pennsylvania Hospital?”
He studied the road ahead. “Thirty minutes, tops.”
I repeated the response to the Bear, but this time it was someone else on the line. “Hurry up and get here, these fucking people are driving me up a wall. You’d think that no one had ever had a baby in the history of vaginas.”
“By fucking people I assume you mean your family?”
“All of ’em, including my uncle Al who in the spirit of the New Year was the only one thoughtful enough to bring wine and glasses.” There was a pause. “How you doin’?”
I stared at my reflection in the window. “I’m good.”
“I heard you’re even more torn all to hell than when we left you.”
“A little.”
There was a pause. “Where are you anyway?”
I spoke out to the driver. “Where are we?”
He trailed the words over his shoulder as I held the phone out. “Lindbergh Boulevard, driving past Suffolk Park.”
When I returned the device to my ear there was real annoyance in her voice. “What the fuck are you doing all the way over there?”
“Avoiding the Mummers.”
“Let me talk to the taxi driver.”
“No.”
There was mumbling in the background and then the voice on the phone changed again. “Daddy?”
I smiled at her voice. “Hey, punk.”
“You’re going to be here, right?”
“Come hell or high water.”
“Do not get involved in any investigations between wherever you are and the hospital.”
“I won’t.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.” The phone went dead, and I repocketed it as we took a right. There was an area of leafless trees, the dark branches reaching up into the metallic sky like veins.
“You are having a grandbaby?”
His voice breaking my reverie, I looked at the one eye I could see in the rearview mirror. “Yep.”
The traffic became more congested, and we slowed. “Congratulations.” We moved a little farther but then stopped again, and he handed me a card with his name on it. “If you have any need for a driver while you are here in Philadelphia, I would be honored to assist you.”
I read it and looked up at him. “You’re a Patel?”
“You know my name?”
“I know the occupation. You’re sure you don’t have any family running a motel in Wyoming?”
“We’re everywhere, a third of all motel owners in the U.S. are called Patel, and it is a surname that indicates that they’re members of a Gujarati Hindu subcaste.”
“I know.” I smiled. “The Patel Motel phenomenon.”
“You actually know this?”
“I do.”
He smiled at me in the mirror. “With your hat, you are a real cowboy?”
“No.” We slowly passed under another highway and into the patchwork of blocks that made up most cities, red brick and buildings a lot older than 1890.
He drummed the steering wheel, venting his frustration with the traffic. “But they let you wear the hat?”
“I’m a sheriff.”
He shrugged. “So you get to do whatever you want.”
I thought about it and watched the landscape change from strip malls to light industry as we passed over the Schuylkill River. “Not exactly.”
He eyed me again. “Looks like somebody did whatever they wanted to you—no offense.”
“None taken.” I felt the stitches on my face, feeling as if I were growing spines through my cheek like a porcupine; the itching had finally gotten so bad that I’d just taken the bandages off. “I’ve had a rough couple of days.”
“Chasing bad guys?”
I smiled even though it hurt, his phrase reminding me of the answering machine message my daughter had recorded for me: This is the Longmire residence, we’re not able to answer your call right now because we’re out chasing bad guys or trying on white hats . . . “Something like that.”
“Train robbers?”
“Nope.” I had slept and dreamed the entire flight from Gillette to Denver, awakened briefly to climb on the second plane, and then had dreamed and slept from Denver to Philadelphia, but the dreams were crowded with white buffaloes and dark prophecies. I was still tired. Maybe it was because I was punchy, but every once in a while you find yourself in a situation where you want to talk, and sometimes it’s to a total stranger, maybe even a stranger who doesn’t know that a faraway place like Wyoming exists. “There was a suicide of a sheriff’s investigator in an adjacent county, and I was called in on the case.”
“Sheriffs have investigators out there?”
I glanced up at the skyline of the fifth-largest city in the United States and the back of William Penn or, at least, the Alexander Milne Calder twenty-seven-ton bronze sculpture of the man, one of two hundred and fifty bronzes that adorn the outside of city hall, with seven hundred rooms, the largest municipal building in the country. “Oh, I bet you’ve got them here, too.”
“This Wyoming sounds like a rough place.”
“Not really, we have about twenty homicides a year in comparison to Philadelphia, which averages about three hundred and twenty.”
“Yes, but we are a big city.”
“And we’re a big state.”
Calder had wanted the statue to face south so that the detail he’d wrought in Penn’s features would be highlighted by the sunshine to better reveal the complexity of the work. There would be no sunshine today, but it didn’t matter; the statue faces northeast toward my daughter’s building in Old City near Fishtown, commemorating the site where Penn signed the treaty with the Lenape tribe to create the city. “Anyway, this suicide put me on the case of three missing women.”
“Did you find them?”
“Yep.”
He shrugged. “That’s good.”
“One is dead.”
“That is bad.”
“Yep.” I sighed. “And I guess there’s somebody out there that’s put a contract on my life.”
“I am sorry for your troubles.”
It was a heartfelt statement. “Me, too.” I spotted a cheese steak joint and felt my stomach growl and tried to think of the last time I’d eaten anything. “One of the women was found in Miami, and we turned all the information over to the FBI—the authorities there located her.”
The phone vibrated in my hand. “Excuse me.” I cupped it to my ear. “I’m ten minutes away.”
“I’m hoping that’s not the case.”
I recognized the voice of the Gillette patrolman. “Dougherty?”
“Yeah, did you make it to Philadelphia?”
“I did, what are you doing working on New Year’s Day?”
“The sheriff offered me the Cold Case position and I took it. He said I had a unique skill set that would be perfect for the job.”
“He fire Richard Harvey?”
“He’s out on dental leave.”