The two women looked at each other, then the pastor turned back to me. “She says she’s waiting on the Messiah.”
I took a long time in responding but then laughed. “Aren’t we all?”
Elaine leaned in close but then retreated a little, probably from the smell. I haven’t been bathing regularly, being so busy. “I’m serious, Sheriff. She says she’s supposed to meet Him. Here. Today.”
I wasn’t sure if I’d heard her right. “Jesus?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus.” I sighed, glancing around trying not to cast aspersions, but it was hard. “Returning after two thousand years and he chooses the Sinclair station in Powder Junction, Wyoming?”
“Apparently.”
I ran my hand through my beard. “Well, I guess I‘d better go talk to her.”
As I stood, Elaine held out a roll of breath mints. “Maybe you should have a few of these?”
Liz touched the stained sleeve of my bathrobe but only briefly. “And you should probably know—she has a knife.”
* * *
There are twenty-four counties in Wyoming. Ours, being the least populated, gets designated number twenty-four—the number in front of Steamboat the bucking horse on the longest-running license plate in the world—so the Buick was not only from in-state but also from in-county. Stumbling across the snow-covered parking lot in my moccasins, I approached the idling Buick from the rear of the driver’s side.
The woman was elderly, probably approaching eighty years of age, dressed in a pair of sweatpants and an oversize parka with fake fur around the collar.
Standing there in the melted snow, I tapped on the window.
It startled her, and I could clearly see the butcher knife clutched in her hands as she turned to look at me. Her face was wet from tears, one of her eyes was swollen shut, and I was betting she had a full-blown headache as well. She stared at me the same way the ladies in the convenience store had.
I watched my breath cloud the window between us as the wind lifted the bathrobe. “Hey, could I speak with you for a moment?”
She sat there with her mouth a little open and then began fumbling at finding the window button, but when she did, it only whined a little and then pulled at the rubber weather seal at the top—frozen shut.
I gestured over the top of her car and toward the passenger-side door. “How ’bout I come around and get in?”
She nodded, and I ambled my way around the four-door and pulled on the handle—it too, frozen shut. Unwilling to take no for an answer, I put all six feet five inches and two hundred and fifty pounds behind the effort and almost took the door off. I quickly climbed in and slammed it shut behind me.
It seemed warmer in the car, but not by much. The radio was on some AM station and a guy was screaming about it being the Millennium, and therefore the end of the world, about salvation and a bunch of other stuff. I didn’t think my head could hurt any more than it already did, but the radio was so loud that the headache escalated. I reached up, turned the thing off, and looked at her. “Sorry, I can’t take that crap.”
She stared at me with her mouth still hanging open.
I was ready to rest my head on the dash but figured I’d better see what was what first. I stamped the snow off my moccasins onto the rubber floor mats. “Lot of snow.”
She nodded.
I gestured toward the weapon in her hands. “Mind if I have the knife?”
Without hesitation, she handed it to me, and I placed it on the floor by my feet. I turned back to look at her, but she was the first to speak. “You . . . You’re bigger than I thought you’d be.”
It seemed like an odd thing to say, especially since I was pretty sure I didn’t know her. “I get that a lot.” She seemed to want more, so I added. “From my father’s side.”
She nodded, studying me. “I understand.”
I straightened the collar of my robe. “I apologize for the way I’m dressed, but I really wasn’t planning on going out today.”
“That’s okay.”
She looked like she might begin crying again, and I felt a little empathetic twinge. “I’ve had some problems of my own as of late. . . .”
She nodded enthusiastically, wiping the tears away with the back of a hand aged with spots and wrinkled skin, careful to avoid the wounded eye. “Me, too.”
I held my fingers out to the heater vents, stretching them as a matter of course, buying time till my head stopped hurting enough so that I could concentrate. “I guess that’s what this life is all about, getting from one trouble to the next, at least in my job.”
She turned in the seat. “I would imagine; and you get everybody’s problems.”
“Pretty busy, especially during the holidays.”
“Yes.” Her eyes shone. “Everybody thought I was crazy, but I said you’d come.”
I looked around, yawning and stretching my jaw muscles, the popping in my head sounding like gunshots. “Well, when we get a call . . .” I sat there for a moment longer, looking at her, and then reached a hand out and touched her cheek. “Tell me about this problem.”
She ducked her head away but then reached up and took my hand, holding it in her lap like she had held the knife. She didn’t say anything, and we just sat there in the Buick, listening to the running motor and the fan of the heater. “He doesn’t mean to do it.”
“Uh-huh.”
“But I forget things.” She sobbed a little. “I just don’t remember like I used to.” She stared at the dash, the instruments glowing a soft green.
* * *
It was a modest little home on the outskirts of town, a single-level ranch, the kind that can contain a lot of rage. There was a yellowed plastic illuminated Santa in the yard, and I was surprised that when we met at the front of the car, she looked at it and then at me. “I hope you don’t mind.”
Wondering what she was talking about, I glanced at the jolly old elf; I decided not to judge. “Um, no. I’m a big fan myself.”
Her spirits buoyed. “Oh, good.”
Oddly, she took my hand again, and we walked up the shoveled walk to the front porch, a gold cast emanating from a needless bug bulb. As we stood there, she threaded her fingers into her parka and produced a prodigious key ring.
Suddenly, the door was yanked open, and a bald man with a Little League baseball bat in one hand was yelling at the two of us through the storm door; another wave of pain ricocheted around in my head.
“Where the hell have you been? Do you know there’s no damn cigarettes in this house?” Peering through heavily framed glasses, he glanced up at me. “And who the hell is this?”
Her head, having dropped in embarrassment, rose as she clutched my arm. “This, Ernie, is our Lord and Savior.”
I stopped pinching my nose in an attempt to relieve the pain and turned to look down at her. She smiled a hopeful smile, and then we both turned to look at him.
He stood there for a moment looking first at her, then at me, and then back to her before leaning the baseball bat against the doorjamb. “Jesus H. Christ.”
She smiled and nodded. “That’s right.”
Through the pain in my head, I smiled—it seemed like the thing to do.
He pushed open the storm door, reached out, grabbed her hand, and half yanked her into the house. “God damnit, get in here before you wander out into traffic.”
He tried to close the door, but I caught it and held it open. He struggled, but I figure I had him by a hundred and fifty pounds. His eyes had a panicked look. “You’re not coming in here.”
I took the aluminum frame in my other hand and pulled him through onto the porch. “Nope, you’re coming out here.” I looked in at the elderly woman and smiled reassuringly, holding up a finger. “We’ll be just a minute.”
She nodded and gave me a little wave.
When I turned to the old man, he had shuttled toward the corner of the porch like a sand crab, under the light on the porch. He looked uncertain and then spoke in a low voice. “Look, if you’re a hobo and need some change . . .”