“That obvious, huh?”
“Only to me, doll.”
I could’ve sipped the whiskey, but I guzzled it.
“Another?” John-John asked.
“No. I’ll take a Coke.” I looked around. Place was damn near empty. “Where is everyone? There had to be ten cars out there.”
“In the back. Tootsie is teaching her fellow retirees how to shoot darts.”
Tootsie, a sassy, spry “woman of age” was one of my favorite customers, not only because she’d palled around with my mother. “Why?”
“Guess at a bridge game the gals’ husbands commented about them being too old to learn new tricks. Tootsie took offense and plans to teach ‘them duffers’ a thing or two.”
I rolled the cold soda glass between my sticky palms. Had Kiki reached Mulligan’s yet? With her iron stomach I doubted she’d be puking her guts out over the fence line.
“Mercy?”
“Hmm?”
“You wanna tell me what’s goin’ on that you didn’t even chuckle at Tootsie’s antics?”
“Sorry. Just thinking.”
“Wanna share with the class?”
“It’s about some of that woo-woo stuff.”
John-John dropped two maraschino cherries in my Coke. “Is the woo-woo stuff happening to you?”
“Yeah. Something that another Indian guy said to me.”
He gasped like an offended spinster. “You been seeing another winkte behind my back?”
That brought a half smile. “No worries, kola. You’re the only two-spirited person in my life.”
“I worry you’re carrying too many burdens, doll.”
“I am.”
“So tell me.”
I studied him. Warned him. “Okay. Just don’t get pissy that I haven’t told you before. A few years ago, I died. I was literally dead to the world for… several minutes, at least. It’s stayed classified in my medical and military records. The day after I found Jason’s body, I ran into this Indian guy. He told me because I’d been brought back to life, dead spirits are drawn to me. That I have some sort of dead man’s ESP, which is just fucking awesome.”
John-John studied me. “Are you asking me if this is true in the Sioux spiritual world?”
“I guess. I don’t know. Hell, I don’t know anything except I’m sick and tired of being a divining rod for the newly departed.”
John-John leaned across the bar until I looked up at him. “Have you found another dead body recently? Since Jason Hawley?”
“Uh-huh.”
“When?”
“About thirty minutes ago.”
He poured another shot and nudged it at me.
I knocked it back. “Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, John-John. Why me? Don’t you think I’ve dealt with enough death? Don’t you think it’s cosmically unfair that now I have to spend the rest of my life worried I don’t stumble over rotting corpses?”
“Where did you run into this Indian guy?”
“The first time? He came in here. Remember that good-looking Indian dude you were flirting with?”
“Ah.” John-John smiled. “He is a hard one to forget. What’s his name?”
“Shay Turnbull.”
“That name don’t sound Sioux, not that it matters. I talked to him but didn’t get a sense of… well, anything.”
My eyes widened. “You can sense others with enhanced senses?”
“Yep. And I’ve got great gaydar, too. Pity this Shay guy ain’t batting for our team. But back to your question. He’s right. It’s kind of a cosmic lottery how often this sensibility will appear or how it’ll affect you for the long term.”
“And to think I wanted to win the lottery.” Sweet juice burst in my mouth as I bit down on a fat cherry. “So if I know the person, even in passing, my odds are…?”
“Even higher.”
Mercy Gunderson, bloodhound of the dead. I wondered if it was too late to get that as my campaign slogan.
“Who’d you find?”
I looked over my shoulder, then at him. “Victor Bad Wound.”
John-John blanched.
“Cherelle called me because he’s been missing and Saro’s on her ass. I went looking. And lucky me, I found him on my first try.”
“Did you just leave him there?”
“No. But I couldn’t face Dawson and his suspicion about me finding yet another body, especially when he already thinks I’m a walking catastrophe, so I called Kiki. She’s taking credit for my accidental police work.” I drained my Coke. “I need to go home. Thanks for the ear.”
“Anytime, doll.”
Anna wasn’t around when I returned to the cabin. Chances were she was at Pete’s Pawnshop, pawing through junk and jawing with Pete. I didn’t get her fascination with the place, but I was secretly happy she wasn’t underfoot.
So far, Anna’s purchases, besides the TV/DVD player, consisted of a crusty milk can, a rainbow crocheted tissue box, and a pair of spurs. When I asked her about the spurs, since she’d never ridden a horse, she handed them to me as a gift and explained the spurs were a daily reminder for me to face my fears.
Maybe it was snarky, demanding to see what she’d bought for herself. She showed me a tiny plain tin box. I opened it, expecting to find a treasure, but there was nothing within.
Anna explained the box represented her: small, unadorned, tough on the outside, but inside… empty.
I’d stopped asking about her purchases after that.
With no campaign events scheduled, and no job demanding my time, I looked forward to a night at home. But I needed something to take my mind off finding Victor’s body. Or from wondering if Cherelle had played me. Or from wishing I’d never agreed to run for sheriff.
I wasn’t in the mood to target shoot, but I could quiet my mind and keep my hands busy by catching up on reloading.
Catch up. Right. I had bins of shell casings. Not only because I’d spent a lot of time shooting, but in my boredom, I’d stumbled across my dad’s storage cache of casings. His “storage” method consisted of throwing spent shell casings in Sheetrock buckets in the barn. It’d taken me a solid week to sort, throw out, clean, and organize the shells.
Not all shooters reload their ammunition. I did it in a limited capacity. Shells were damn expensive and harder to come by for larger calibers. Since my dad taught me to shoot, he’d also taught me to reload. The tangy scent of brass reminded me of him, and today I had the overwhelming urge to connect with some part of him.
A clement breeze, overloaded with the scent of the chokecherry blossoms, eddied around me as I headed to the storage shed. I grabbed the reloading bench and carried it into the cabin. Most people didn’t reload in the house, but the shed was too small, too dark, and just plain uncomfortable. Any activity with firearms, including bullets, made Hope nervous, so I’d hauled everything-the bench, the tools, the die sets, the scale, the tumblers, and the cans of gunpowder-from the barn to the cabin. If I wanted to set up my reloading bench in the damn kitchen, I could. My house, my rules.
I’d already “cleaned” the cases by tossing them in the tumbler with ground walnut shells. Then I sealed them in plastic bags so they were ready to reload when I had time.
I chose the die I needed for pressing out the spent primers and resizing the cases, screwing it into the top of the loading press. Getting the first case properly sized took the most time.
My mind was blessedly blank as I focused on each step. I’d managed to finish half the lot in blissful silence when I heard a car in the drive. Anna had returned.
She wandered in and tossed her ball cap on the couch. “Hey, you’re doing something useful, imagine that.”
“Fuck off.”
“Do you ever just sit around and do… nothing?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“Sad. You want a beer?”
“Nah.” Mixing alcohol and gunpowder? Not a good idea.
Anna plopped down next to me after helping herself to a Corona. “So. Reloading, huh?”