I got to the end of the song listings and then went back in the other direction just to make sure I hadn’t missed it.
“About that time the Indian looks up at them and says, ‘Covered wagon pulled by two oxen, one white, the other speckled, one man, one woman, three children and a black dog-wagon full of all family supplies.’ The one cowboy looks at the other one and says, ‘That’s amazing.’ The Indian continued, ‘Yes, ran over me about a half-hour ago.’”
Lolo chuckled in spite of herself and glanced toward the two bathroom doors, one marked “SQUAWS,” the other “BRAVES,” that led toward the pool table past the jukebox where I stood. “Thom, sometimes…” And she finally laughed wholeheartedly.
His eyes almost disappeared in the folds around the sockets. “It makes me happy to see you laughing the way you used to, Little-Lo. You don’t laugh enough anymore.”
She gently placed a hand on his shoulder. “I guess it’s the job, Thom.” She took a deep breath and glanced over to me. “I’ve had some help with that lately, though.”
I leaned against the jukebox and tipped my hat back in an aw-shucks manner. “No Ballad of Ira Hayes.”
She let the hand slip from the mayor’s shoulder and crossed to me. “No?”
“No.” I glanced at Thom. “When’s the last time they changed the music on this machine?”
He shook his head, looked at the floor, and then back to us. “Never that I know of.”
“That means that Artie didn’t call from here.”
She studied me. “Then where?”
“Could’ve been anywhere: a cell phone in Artie’s truck, a home stereo, or a radio station.”
Thom watched us like we were a tennis match, but I cut him off before he could start in with the jokes again. “The key is the woman; if we know who the woman is then we know where the place might’ve been.”
“And why are you telling me this?”
“Because I think you know who she is.”
It was at that point that the Squaws bathroom door opened and two individuals of separate sexes exited. One was an obese woman with a modified beehive hairdo and way too much makeup; the other was a skinny white guy with a shaved head, a flame tattoo spiraling up his neck, and sunglasses, despite the gloom inside. The man held a brown plastic grocery sack and looked very surprised to see us.
I smiled. “Mr. Kelly Joe Burns-I see you have your belt on.”
He paused there for a second, pushed Nattie Tyminski toward us, and then dodged behind the bar through the doorway toward the back. It took both of us to catch the screaming woman, who stumbled, fell halfway to the floor, wrapped one arm around me and the other around Chief Long’s leg, and held on for dear life.
The chief was the first to disentangle, and she lithely leapt over the bar and through the back door. “Arrest her!”
After getting the woman to her feet, I handcuffed her to the refrigerator and went outside to take a quick look at the blue Dodge. I busied myself for a moment and then went to the right in the direction of the as-big-as-a-very-large-house giant pile of beer cans but couldn’t see where Lolo and Burns might’ve gone.
I stopped by a Dumpster, which was made out of a couple of fifty-five-gallon drums sitting on a crumbling concrete pad next to the huge pile, and listened; it sounded like the cans were being stepped on and were sliding down the hill.
I approached the gigantic assembly and worked my way around the periphery-Lolo Long with her sidearm drawn was thirty feet above me and was panning the. 44 around the area. She must’ve half-seen me and swung the big Smith toward my chest.
“Whoa, Chief!”
She raised the barrel of the revolver skyward. “Where is he?”
“You don’t know?”
She slipped on the mountain of crushed aluminum and almost fell. “No, he disappeared.”
I circled the base of the thing, held in check by the remnants of an old foundation, and figured that must’ve been how “the largest pile of beer cans in the world” had started; somebody had run a wheelbarrow out the back and dumped them into the place where a building must’ve been in the twenties, and the tradition had continued on into the twenty-first century. The smell of stale beer, even in the moderate heat of the morning, was sinus clearing.
“Where did you lose him?”
She screamed in frustration, finally forming words. “I followed him up over this trash heap, and when I got to this side, he was gone!” She took a step and then slid down and fell in a tumbling avalanche. “Damn it!”
I stood there watching the slipping cascade of cans. “Well, I guess there’s only one thing to do.” She stood back up and watched as I drew my Colt and raised my voice. “Throw a few shots into this pile and see what happens. If he’s in there, I’ll probably get him.”
There was a wheelbarrow load that hadn’t made it to the mountain proper, smaller and more scattered than would’ve hidden a man. I raised my. 45, snapped off the safety, and pulled the trigger-a few cans flew into the air.
So did Kelly Joe Burns.
As I’d suspected, he’d slipped and fallen but had been smart enough to realize that the mountain of cans could provide a fine hiding place, at least before I threatened to shoot it.
If we’d thought Kelly Joe was fast before, we hadn’t seen anything. The man practically levitated from the cans downgrade from where Chief Long sat and about a third of the way around the base from where I stood before remembering to throw the bag he held over the top of the pile.
We both yelled at him to stop, but we might as well have been talking to the wind in both solidity and velocity. As I circled the base, I pointed toward the spot where he’d been buried. “Get the bag!”
She stumbled and slid as I ran after the world’s fastest non-Indian.
Back at USC, as an offensive tackle, I had been able to outrun any other two-hundred-and-fifty-pound man in Southern California for forty yards; we were now more than a couple of decades past that, I was coming up on my forty yard limit, and Kelly Joe Burns didn’t weigh close to two hundred and fifty pounds.
He had run toward the road but had circled back to the front of the bar, and I could hear the sound of the Dodge’s starter, grinding away.
I stopped at the edge of the asphalt and attempted to catch my breath by bending over and placing a hand on one of my knees for support as I pulled the coil wire from my shirt pocket and dangled it like a dead rat for him to see.
He looked at me, threw open the door, and ran across Route 39 just as an eighteen-wheeler bellowed down the road from Colstrip. The white cattle truck locked its brakes and blew its horn, and I watched as Kelly Joe slid underneath and came up on the other side.
“You’ve got to be kidding…”
I skimmed around the rear end of the Freightliner full of unhappy cows when another horn sounded and caused my heart to skip like a warped record album. I was pretty sure I’d checked for oncoming traffic, but was surprised to find both of my hands, one still holding the. 45, on the hood of a Baltic blue 1959 Thunderbird convertible.
The car had stopped, and my daughter and soon-to-be in-law stared at me with stunned looks on their faces. I coughed and held up one finger as I lurched off the stationary Ford into the barrow ditch after Kelly Joe.
Holstering the sidearm felt like the right thing to do in front of Cady and Lena, and besides, I figured I wasn’t going to really have to shoot Burns. There was a well-worn trail at the base of the ditch beside a barbed-wire fence. I looked north, then started off south-my daughter kept pace with the Thunderbird in low gear and Lena, having folded her arms on the door sill, sat up on her knees to look down at me as if she were in a parade.
“What are you doing?”
I coughed again and struggled to get enough air to reply. “Chasing a drug dealer.”
“I thought you were chasing a murderer.”
I glanced around and jogged on. “This is kind of a side bet.”