“He just seemed odd.”
The next statement fairly flooded with sarcasm. “Really?”
I conjured up the brief image of the scared young man and held it there in front of my eyes. “The way he stood there for that moment: flexing his hands repeatedly, no eye contact, on the balls of his feet . . .”
“He’s a ’tard?”
I sighed and felt the bridge of my own nose. “Just . . . odd.”
“Health Services?”
I dialed the number and listened as it transferred me to the answering machine; Nancy Griffith asked me to record a message. I declined and placed the receiver on the cradle.
I pulled the phone book from the top drawer of my desk and leafed through to the G’s. “This stuff is a lot easier when Ruby’s around.” I pinned Nancy with a forefinger and dialed. On the third ring she answered, and I described a young man she’d never seen. “You’re sure?”
“Positive. The description doesn’t match up with any of our current clients. Have you tried the Wyoming Boys’ School?”
“In Worland?”
“Stranger things have happened.” I listened as she chuckled and was reminded that she had sung in the church choir with Martha. “Hey, are you going to the football game on Friday?”
“Why, is there a problem?”
She waited a moment before responding. “Does there always have to be a problem when you’re invited somewhere?”
“Generally.”
“It’s homecoming, and they’re retiring your number.”
“Oh.”
“They’re retiring Henry Standing Bear’s number, too. Didn’t anyone get ahold of you?” There was another pause, but it wasn’t long enough for me to come up with an answer or an excuse. “I think everybody up at the high school would appreciate it if the two of you showed up at halftime for the celebration.”
“Friday. Um . . . I’ll see what I can do. Thanks, Nance.”
I hung up the phone and watched as Vic reapplied the now-not-so-frozen peas to her nose. “What was all that about?”
“What?”
“Friday.”
“Nothing.” I continued to think about the odd young man as I looked at the Durant Dogies annual on my desk. “He’s got to live in the neighborhood.”
“Was she just asking you out on a date?”
“What?” I glanced back up at her. “No.”
Her tone became a little sharper. “Then what’s Friday?”
“A football thing; they’re going to retire my number.”
She looked amused. “You’re kidding.”
“Nope. Henry’s, too.”
“I wanna go.”
“No.”
“C’mon, I never got to do that crap when I was a teenager.” She thought about it. “I never dated any football guys in high school.”
I was momentarily distracted. “What kind of guys did you date?”
“Thirty-seven-year-olds named Rudy with mustaches and vans—guys that would give my parents heart attacks.” She studied me. “I wanna go, and I want a corsage, just like Babs.” I didn’t respond and slumped in my guest chair. “Please tell me we’re not going to canvas the neighborhood in the short bus with have-you-seen-this-half-naked-retard posters?”
“I thought we’d knock on a few doors.”
“That or we just bait a few Havahart traps with Double Stuf Oreos.” She struggled to her feet. “But I don’t think we have to do that here.” She reached down and held up the inside band of the pants toward me. It read CITY OF BELLE FOURCHE DEPARTMENT OF SANITATION.
• • •
I made a few more phone calls to the services in Butte County, South Dakota, that were open on a Sunday afternoon, but they didn’t know anything about a runaway, so we met Double Tough at the gravel turnout above the T Bar T. “Nothing?”
The ex–oil rig jockey was built like a brick pillar. When I first met him he’d been shot, something he’d neglected to mention until later in the conversation; hence, his nickname. “Nope, and I asked at every house within a quarter mile of the place.”
“Nobody’s seen him or heard of him?”
“Nope.”
I glanced down the driveway toward the little white house with the red shutters. “I’ll go down and tell Barbara that I’m going to have a look. Why don’t you two just hang around up here in the shade and watch Dog?”
As I walked off, I heard Double Tough ask about Vic’s nose. Just because he was double tough didn’t mean he was double smart. I made my way to the front porch and told Mrs. Thomas about my intentions. “You don’t have to do that, Walter.”
“I’d feel better if I had a look around. If you don’t know this young man or anything about him, it might be best if we at least spoke with him.”
She nodded but there wasn’t much enthusiasm in it.
As she closed the door, I made my way across the front of the house to the small garage and entered from the side door, which was adjacent to the walkway alongside the house. There was a scary-looking 1969 Mustang convertible with badges on the side that read COBRA JET. It was semihidden underneath a car cover and was a testament to Bill Thomas’s last vehicular purchase before his death in ’71. The thing probably had a thousand miles on the odometer and was the lust of every driving-age male in the county.
There was a workbench to my right with an assortment of baby food jars filled with screws and nails that probably dated back to Fort Fetterman, but there were a lot of hand tools that looked as though they’d been used recently, as well as spare lumber that had been placed in the rafters, along with a hidden stack of vintage Playboy magazines. Other than that, the place looked undisturbed.
I closed the door behind me and remembered something Barbara had said about a pump house. We live in the high desert, and considering that the yard was very green and the flower beds abundant with blooms, I figured the water had to come from somewhere.
Following my boots down a path overgrown with wild morning glories toward the bank of Clear Creek, I veered in the direction of the bridge. I could see the pitched roof of the outbuilding that had had its shingles repaired recently and could even make out the restored patch.
The grass was higher as I cut off from the walkway, and I waded through the stalks to the small pad at the front. There was a clasp screwed into the surface of the door, but the rusted Master Lock was loose, and I unhooked it from the loop and pulled the door open with the wooden handle. It had probably been a smoke house at some point, which would explain the faint odor of charred wood—that and the rusted points in the rafters that were stained from the places where some kind of meat hook had been attached.
There was a small 2.5 horsepower irrigation pump feeding water from the creek to a system with pipes that rose up through the dirt floor and then returned in two-inch diameters. I walked around the pump, placed my hand on the outgoing line, and felt the surge of cold water as it flowed through.
As my eyes settled in the gloom, I could see that there was a steel, fold-up bunk running along the wall on the other side—the kind people used to use for guests. There was an old military blanket on the twin mattress, tucked in so tight you could have bounced a roll of quarters off of it.
When I got to the bed, I heard a different sound under my boots and stepped back, revealing the vague outline of something square buried in the floor. I kneeled down and brushed away some of the dust. There was a small hook on one side, so I moved it and lifted the lid of what appeared to be an old milk jug container buried in the dry dirt. It was dark in the hole, and I wished I was wearing my duty belt with my trusty Maglite attached, but instead, I just stuck my hand in the submerged box.
The first thing I found was a magazine—Gun Buyer’s Annual, this year’s date. It was an encyclopedic guide to all the weapons available on the private market. The illustrations on the glossy cover, starring a collection of rifles, shotguns, semiautomatics, and radical carbines, had been thumbed away at the center where someone had spent hours studying the thing. I opened the magazine—practically every page was dog-eared.