I said, “Maybe just call, Chief. It’s almost twenty miles out to their place.”
He shook his head. “Some news you have to deliver in person.” He spit tobacco, left a thin trail down his chin. “And I think I’d like to make sure their trucks are parked out there. If I call and there’s no answer, they can say they didn’t feel like getting out of bed.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant, but I didn’t say nothing.
Krueger rubbed his chin. “I’ll drive out there. Billy, I want you to open up the office and get the paperwork started. Toby, watch the body.”
I blinked. “What?”
“Watch the body.” “He ain’t going anywhere.”
Krueger gave me a look that made me wilt. “Son, you can’t leave a corpse lying in plain sight unattended. You’re the part-time deputy, so you get the grunt work. You want to earn your way on full time, don’t you?”
“Okay.”
“Billy will get the paperwork started and leave a message for the county coroner. Lord knows how long it’ll take that lazy son of a bitch to make it out our way. I won’t be gone long.” He looked at the holstered revolver in my hand. “Stick that under your car seat.”
Billy gave me a wink and headed for the station.
The chief put a hand on my shoulder. “You know I have faith in you, boy.”
“I know.”
“I need you to grow up a little bit. We get you on the payroll full time, we need to show the other fellows that you’re mustard. That you belong. Right?”
I nodded.
The chief had known my parents, knew my situation when I came back. Some of the folks around town had looked at the chief funny when he’d given me the tin star. Even if it was only part time. But nobody questioned him. He was the chief.
He was the Sheriff too. Town council gave him the chief job, but he had to get elected to be sheriff, and Krueger had won reelection four terms in a row. Paychecks for the deputies came out of the county fund, and the chief position was overseen by the city. Since Coyote Crossing was the only town in the county, I wasn’t sure how it made a difference.
Anyway, the chief liked to be called chief, not sheriff.
Krueger gave my shoulder one more friendly squeeze.
He got into his squad car and drove off into the dusty wide nothing of Oklahoma. The darkness ate his taillights, and I stood with my shoe-laces untied, babysitting Luke Jordan’s mortal remains.
About ten minutes and three cigarettes later and I’d had about enough of watching Luke’s wide-open eyes, and it was hot anyway. I wondered why I had to watch the body. Couldn’t we just bag it? And why didn’t Krueger call the county boys? We’d never had a shooting inside the town limits before. On Law & Order some guy usually snapped a few pictures of the stiff, and I wondered if maybe Billy was coming back later with a camera. Maybe they’d let me take the pictures. That would be cool if I snagged the corpse photographer gig.
I left the body and went into Skeeter’s. Wayne was pushing a pile of dust and bottle caps across the floor with a ragged broom. He looked at me. I waved, reached into the cooler and grabbed a Coke. “Pay you tomorrow, okay, Wayne?”
“Sure.” But he didn’t sound thrilled about it. Guys like that always worried on the details.
Wayne was on the town council and still swept up his own place every night. Coyote Crossing was that kind of town. Hell, if I ever got to be the boss of anything, be damned if I was still going to do the sweeping up. What was the point? Wayne was stooped. His bald head gleamed with sweat. Deep, dark eyes and an acne-scarred face. He worked so damn hard at everything, it seemed to me like he was always about to fall over.
I picked up the pay phone and dialed Billy at the station. He answered, and I asked, “Billy, how come the chief didn’t call the county?”
He sighed big. “Let him worry about it. Just keep the flies off Jordan.”
“You want anything before Wayne closes up?”
“No thanks.”
“Okay.” I hung up.
But instead of going back out to the body, I took down one of the stools Wayne had put up and perched there, sipping the Coke. I put the cold can against my forehead. I’d sure be glad when it got around October and cooled down some “Looks like Luke had trouble with some Mexicans.”
“No Mexicans in here.” Wayne didn’t look up from his sweeping.
“Chief said he was grabbing ass with some Mexican girl.”
“Oh.” Sweep, sweep. “He told you, huh?”
“Sure. Why not?”
“Just didn’t want to make a story out of it, I guess. The chief’ll handle it.”
“Yeah.”
I put the stool back and took my Coke outside.
I went back to the body. Luke Jordan’s eyes looked like wet glass, his skin like rubber or something. A body sort of looks fake when the life goes out of it. He looked like a fake dead body in a Shriner’s haunted house fundraiser. I looked up and down the street. Nobody around. I knelt next to Luke, took the wallet out of his back pocket. No cash. Damn. I put the wallet back. I found a set of keys in his front pocket. The chief would probably ask me to move Luke’s truck later, so I took them and put them in the glove compartment of the Nova.
I leaned against the Nova, sparked up another Winston. How long would this take? If I stood here all night, I might need to arrange some things. My wife Doris had to be at the diner for her shift by seven which meant somebody had to watch the boy if I couldn’t be there. Maybe that old Indian woman we hired sometimes. She worked cheap.
Damn. I sure as hell needed the department to put me on full time, but Coyote Crossing sucked hind tit as far as the state budget was concerned. What pioneer dumbshit named this place Coyote Crossing? Some white guy probably. It probably used to be called some Creek Indian word that meant scorpion hell spirit bullshit or something, and then the railroad came through and some white guy changed it. I’d have to remember to look that up some time.
I had a long list in my head of things I wanted to look up. Some day. Not like I owned any encyclopedias. Maybe in the library.
I finished the cigarette, flicked away the butt and looked at my watch. I’d killed exactly ninety-seven seconds.
Hell.
Screw this.
I hiked the three blocks to Molly’s house. Molly was about the only good thing in this town when I came back. I’d left with a guitar and six hundred bucks I’d saved up mowing lawns and pitching sod. Came back to bury my mother and got stuck. The town hadn’t grown one inch since I’d been away. Hell, we were so far out you couldn’t use cell phones. Satellites didn’t fly over. We might as well have been in another fucking dimension. I’m surprised they bothered putting us on the road maps.
I thought about getting a band together, but there were only high school punks who kept tripping over their own peckers or old men with banjos. And where would we play anyway? There wasn’t enough room in Skeeter’s for a drum set. Screw it. Anyway, I was going to be a law man. Some plan.
I slowed up at the edge of Molly’s yard, made sure the coast was clear. It wasn’t a bad little house, three bedrooms, big front porch with a swing. About fifty years old but in good shape. Molly’s room was on the side. I knocked on her window. Her step-dad drove a big rig and was out of town, but I didn’t want to chance he’d come home early, so I always went to the window. Molly was two months shy of eighteen. Molly’s mom had run off a year ago.
She came to the window, and I saw she hadn’t been asleep. Sometimes she stayed up all night smoking cloves and reading books. She had a paperback of Ayn Rand in her hand. Big book. I generally didn’t read anything thicker than Road & Track.