“Yes, ma’am.”
Jean smoothed her hands over her hips, turning toward the archway. “The lady will have her next in the bar,” she said.
Now the music was louder, and she was tapping the rim of her margarita glass and Jamie was coming toward her behind the bar.
“There’s a fine piece,” she heard, and turned with her elbows hooked back against the edge of the bar. She wanted to feel like a fine piece.
“So tell me, boys,” she said, and when only the men at the nearest table turned she repeated it loud enough that they stopped playing pool at the end of the room, leaning against their cues. She brought the fresh margarita up for a sip. “So tell me, boys,” she said again, pausing, “who’d like to fuck the sheriff’s wife?”
They stared at her, then glanced at one another like kids at a dance, and she began to laugh and couldn’t stop, didn’t even try to.
Twenty-eight
CRANE FORCED the county SUV along a rutted mining track, stopping at the edge of a gully where the road had washed out. He stood staring down at the collapsed and rusted body of the culvert, at the shabby remains of the company buildings just a hundred yards beyond.
He crossed the creek on foot, working up the north-facing slope through the sage and juniper, skirting the house-sized erratics of weather-paled basalt, stopping to look across the valley to the mineshaft-sealed now, but not until one of the Manon kids had fallen through the rotted planking. He’d been with the search-and-rescue team that had gotten her out. The sheets of muscle in his diaphragm clenched and he lay down against the sidehill, panting, waiting for it to pass. He wondered if God had spoken directly to the girl, lost for hours in the damp tunneling below.
When he gained the skyline he stretched out on his belly in the sweep of shade thrown by a stand of chokecherries, the ranch house and outbuildings just five hundred yards below. He brought the binoculars up from around his neck.
There were half a dozen parked trucks and cars, men emerging from the barn two and three at a time to start up their rigs and drive out through the log archway. More cars arrived, everyone going into the big, weathered barn but coming out too quickly to have been of any help.
At dusk a column of bikers rode in. They gunned their engines, then let them idle down, and Brady came out of the barn and stood there talking to them until a man pulled a pistol and fired into the dry brush along the creek. It was just dark enough to see the flames snapping out of the barrel and the house cat breaking from the undergrowth in a desperate sprint, disappearing through an opening in the masonry of the springhouse. Everyone but Brady was rocking at the waist with laughter.
He walked past the man, reached into a slash pile at the border of the drive and wheeled around with a four-foot length of pine scrap, catching the man full in the face, dropping him, then walked back into the barn. The downed man rolled onto his side and from there to his feet, staggering.
Most of the light had gone out of the day, and Crane sat back waiting for the moon to rise. He remembered hunting this valley with his father and old Jake Croonquist when he and Brady were still too young to shoot, sent ahead like eager hounds, circling, flushing the birds back toward them.
A covey of chukars was moving off the hillside behind him now, maybe a couple dozen in all, the accumulation of their low, harsh speech like the whispered conversation of anxious children.
It was late when he got back to town and swung past the clinic, pulling in at the curb. Dan Westerman was sitting on the front stoop.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” Crane said.
“I normally don’t.”
“You get a guy through here a little bit ago?”
“I just put thirty stitches in some simple son of a bitch’s head, if that’s what you mean.” He dropped the butt on the step before him. “I hate fucking motorcycles.”
“He going to be okay?”
“He’s going to be fine, but I hope he’s got a relative who’s a dentist. How are you feeling?”
“A little sick to my stomach.”
It was after midnight when he got home and found her car parked up on the lawn and looked in through the windshield to see if she was asleep on the seat, but it was empty. He could still hear the throaty rumble of the Harleys gearing down into town. The corner streetlight was out, the Milky Way leaving a smear of light across the night sky above him.
He went inside. In the living room his clothes were heaped in the La-Z-Boy with his toilet kit on top. Their bedroom door was shut.
He found clean sheets and a blanket in the hall closet and made up the couch, waking early the next morning. A man stood framed in the kitchen doorway, staring at Crane’s pistol on the table at the foot of the couch. He was middle-aged, dressed in chinos and a golf shirt, a light jacket folded over his arm.
They both looked over at the bedroom door at the same time.
“It doesn’t have anything to do with you,” Crane said. “It’s me she wants to hurt.”
Some of the tension went out of the man’s face, but he cut his eyes back at the pistol.
“This isn’t a movie,” Crane said. “You can go home now.”
He washed his face and under his arms at the kitchen sink and dressed and scooped the clothes and toiletries onto the couch, folding the corners of the blanket back across them, then slung the whole works over his shoulder.
Starla was at her desk when he came in to work.
“You run this back to the far cell for me?”
“You bet.” She didn’t ask why.
Two highway patrolmen, and his undersheriff, Hank Kosky, were waiting in his office.
“You boys get any sleep last night?”
They all nodded.
“Good.”
He walked back out to the wheeled cart by Starla’s desk and poured himself a cup of coffee, stirring in the artificial sweetener as he returned to the office.
The senior patrolman said, “Goddamnit, Crane, it’s not just baby-boomer accountants anymore. We’ve got some bad ones this year. Some Diablos and Angels on their way to Sturgis, I guess.”
Crane sat down behind his desk. “You need more help?”
“I wouldn’t mind it.”
“I’ll make a call.”
The state cops shook his hand, telling him they appreciated his cooperation, and then lingered outside to gossip with Starla.
Hank was still in his chair. “I hope you know this thing’s going to get somebody killed one of these years,” he said. “Or raped.”
“I agree with you, but it’s the mayor you need to talk to.” His back ached but the coffee was helping.
“I’m here to tell you I won’t work that Iron Horse Rodeo. It ain’t Christian.”
Crane stared at him until the older man looked away.
“It’s that weenie-bite event they run. Riding them women under that row of strung-up hotdogs and making ’em snap at them.”
Crane came around the end of the desk and Hank stood out of his chair. He was puffed up, ready for a fight, and Crane looped an arm across his shoulders and guided him through the doorway. He could feel Hank soften.
“They’re just hotdogs,” he said. “And I’m not sure Jesus keeps that close an eye on any of us.”
He drove to the top of the Bighorns, pulled into a campground and turned off the radio and slept in the backseat. He woke in the early evening, feeling more rested than he had in a week, and returned to the office. He cleaned up in the restroom while Starla warmed two Hot Pocket Ultimates in the microwave.
It was after ten when he double-parked at the corner of Ash and walked out into the milling crowd. There were two thousand Harleys backed into the curb for eight blocks along Main and two blocks back on Madison, Jefferson and Adams.
The volunteer fire department had lined hay bales through the crosswalks west of the main drag and the vendors had set up their tents and kiosks in the streets behind them. They hawked knives and cups of beer, leather clothing, Harley-Davidson patches sewn with silver thread. There were two tattoo artists and another offering hygienic piercings. A braut-and-soda stand. Burritos sold from a corner of the IGA parking lot, half the proceeds going to the Boys and Girls Club.