Even in tech boots, jeans, and a nylon duty jacket, she looked good.
“So, are you here for the environs?”
“Yeah, reminds me of the water treatment plants in South Philly.” The blue-black fur collar of her jacket framed her lupine features, and she reminded me of the wolves I’d just left. The tarnished-gold eyes dipped into me. “So, you find the rest of Jimmy Hoffa or what?”
I laughed. “So, you’ve heard about the case of the century.”
“A Felix Polk called in to the office to check for his lost thumb.”
“Damn.” I hooked my own thumbs into my jeans and watched my breath trail off south and east along with my words. “Was Sancho there?”
“No, he’d already gone home to check on his wife and the Critter.”
Vic had taken to calling Antonio the Critter. “Everything okay?”
“Yeah. Critter cries, she calls, he goes.”
“You get a statement from Polk?”
“Yeah, but the finger is taking the fifth.” She shook her head at me. “Walt, what are you doing? I mean you’ve done some crazy shit before, but hiding people’s body parts?”
I studied my boots and rolled my sore foot, giving it a little flex; it responded by hurting like hell. “It’s the end of a thumb, and it’s not like he’s going to glue the damn thing back on.”
She pursed her lips and continued to shake her head at me. “By the way, the thumb in question is resting comfortably, yet not so appetizingly, in the commissary refrigerator butter dish. Now, I’ll ask again. What the hell are you up to?”
I placed an elbow by her boot. It was still piercingly cold, but evidently she didn’t feel like being inside. “The Basquo quit today.”
She folded her arms over her chest and looked back at the sky. “Hmm . . .”
I spoke to her lean throat. “You don’t seem surprised.”
“I guess I saw that one coming.”
I tipped my hat back and gave myself the luxury of studying her some more; the hard curve of her jaw, the sassiness that her face carried even at rest. “You spend more time with him than I do. What’s your prognosis?”
She made the next statement cheerily. “He’s fucked in the head.” She shrugged. “Look, this is not the first time you or I have ever seen this. Maybe it would be best for him to go back to corrections.” She looked straight at me. “Hey, did I just miss something or is there some kind of connection between Felix Polk’s thumb and Saizarbitoria’s future career path?”
I gently tugged at the lace of her boot. “Maybe.”
“Oh shit, is this another one of your salvage operations?” I didn’t say anything, and she sighed with a sense of finality. “All right, I’ll leave that one for now—but in case you forgot, you were supposed to go look at a house with me and buy me dinner. So, I repeat, what the fuck have you been doing?”
“I left you a message on your cell.” I looked up at her. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Doc Bloomfield said you’d gone to feed those dire wolves of Geo Stewart’s, and I thought they must’ve gotten you instead, so I came out here.”
“Somebody had already fed them.”
She glanced in the direction of the peaked gables. “It wouldn’t happen to have been Betty Dobbs, would it?”
I made a face. “How did you know that?”
“Her son, Tweedledum, called in a missing person’s.”
“Great.”
She studied me and smiled, revealing the canine tooth that was just a shade longer than the others. “Is there more to this story?”
Vic loved dish, so I pulled my hat off and rested my forehead on her thigh—I was the picture of abject despair. “Betty Dobbs, my ninth-grade English/civics teacher, is having an affair with Geo Stewart.”
Her leg jumped, my head bounced, and I looked up at her as she covered her mouth with a hand. “Get the fuck out of here; Daughter of the American Revolution, P.E.O., Who’s Who, grand matron of Redhills Rancho Arroyo is shtupping the junkman?”
“I think Municipal Solid Waste Facility Engineer is the title he prefers.”
“Ozzie Junior is going to prefer to put a bullet in his unwashed ass. Is he aware?”
I put my hat back on. “Who?”
“Tweedledum.”
“No.”
“Can I tell him?”
“No.”
“Why?”
I sighed and turned my back to her. “Because if he has to hear about it, I’d just as soon he heard it from somebody other than us.”
She nudged my shoulder with her boot. “So how long’s the old schoolmarm been getting her holster polished?”
I looked back at her. “Since apple season.”
“Fuck me.” I watched as her eyes played across the desolate landscape of the dump, and she distilled the situation to one wicked phrase. “Love among the ruins.”
4
“You do not golf.”
“No, but you do.” I wasn’t making much headway with the Cheyenne Nation. “It’s for a good cause—the American Indian College Fund. You’ve probably heard of it—you being an American Indian and all.”
“Yes.”
I sipped my coffee and took another tack. “I’ll carry your golf bag.”
I could see that my best friend was desperately trying to find an excuse as he stared into his own mug. “Is it a foursome?”
“A what?”
He sighed a long breath like he always did when I was trying his patience. “Generally, these tournaments are played in groups of four.”
Damn. “That means we have to come up with two more people?”
He paused and, even with his apparent reluctance, I had a feeling he was weakening. “Golfers, two more golfers.”
“Right, golfers . . .”
He set his mug down, and his hands covered his face. I studied him, his neck and shoulders so full of muscles that it was a wonder he didn’t creak when he turned his head. He was looking a little tired, and I was beginning to wonder if the winter was getting to him, too.
The recent storm had swept across the Wyoming/Montana border, taken more than a dozen Powder River Energy poles with it and, in a fit of perversion, had left all the water pipes on the Rez and the contiguous area to freeze and bust.
The Bear’s bar, the Red Pony, was one of the first to succumb, and his home had rapidly followed suit. Henry had been our guest for the last two days and, with the rush on qualified plumbers, it was looking as if he was ours for the next week.
He dropped his hands and stood, walking to the window and staring with his dark eyes mirroring the gray light.
“You all right?”
He didn’t move, but the voice sounded in his chest. “Yes.”
“You don’t seem all right.”
He nodded, just barely. “Which is better, being all right or seeming it?”
I let the rhetoric settle in the room like mist after a rain. I knew better than to try and read the weather in him. Like the rest of the high plains, if you did he’d just change.
“It is Lee.”
Henry’s on-again-off-again relationship with his half brother was something he rarely brought up. “Didn’t you see him in Chicago on the way back from Philadelphia?”
“No. I called him and left a message, and then he called and left a message for me. I finally got him to commit to a meeting at a small bar on Halsted, but he did not show. I sat in this bar for forty minutes before the bartender asked if I was Henry Standing Bear.” He turned and pulled back the black hair to reveal a set of features, all of them jockeying on his face to see which would be the most striking. “I was the only Indian in the bar.”
“I’m glad I wasn’t there.”
“Hmm.” He turned back to the window. “Lee had called and left a message that he was not going to be able to make it.” This was not exactly a new occurrence in Henry’s dealings with his brother, but I remained quiet. “I had a dream about him and called three weeks ago and left a message, then called again yesterday, but the number had been disconnected.”