After a wait, during which the faint sound of the radio was suddenly cut off, Fremont rapped on the bar top and called out.
“Katie, you home?”
“Hold your water” came a raspy female voice. In a moment a door at the rear of the bar slammed open, propelled by a kick, and a tall, thin woman in a cowboy shirt and black jeans came in carrying a case of Miller High Life. She banged the door shut behind her with a practiced boot heel and crossed over to the bar to set the box down, where, in the better light, they were able to make her out as a strikingly attractive, or rather a strikingly handsome woman. In her deeply seamed, fine-boned, and weathered brown face a pair of clear calm light-blue eyes looked out from a fan of wrinkles, considering Fremont through narrowed eyes.
“Willard Fremont, in the flesh. You owe me forty-seven dollars and eleven cents.”
“Katie, I want you to meet a friend of mine. This is Micah Dalton. Micah, allow me to introduce Katie Horn.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Katie, taking his hand in a steely grip and giving it a firm shake before spreading her hands out on the bar top and leaning on her braced forearms in the classic bartender pose.
“What can I get you gentlemen, assuming that one of you boys can pay off Willard’s tab here first?”
Dalton went for his wallet, grinning at Fremont, who laid a bony hand on Dalton’s arm and pulled out his own billfold. He extracted a large wad of cash, peeled off a faded fifty, and set it down on the bar top with a degree of smug satisfaction. Katie eyed it with some suspicion, picked it up, and held it under a black light just below the edge of the bar, and then showed them a set of brilliant white teeth as her face creased into a net of deep lines around her eyes.
“Where’d you get all that cash?” she asked, with some affection.
“Stole it from my young friend here,” said Fremont, giving voice to Dalton’s unspoken suspicion: Fremont had been dead flat broke when he pulled him out of the Hayden Lake holding center.
“Found it in the hall safe,” explained Fremont, “while you was out terrifying those poor unfortunate bees.”
“The hall safe was locked and armed,” said Dalton.
“So it was. Katie, my sweet desert rose, I believe I will have a long cold Stella. And my friend’s money is no good here.”
“That is my money,” said Dalton, smiling at Katie.
“It pleases my young friend to be jocular, Katie. Ignore him.”
“He’s too good-looking to ignore,” she said, flirting openly.
“I’ll have a Stella too,” said Dalton. She collected three from the wheezing old cooler, popped them in a graceful succession of practiced wrist flips, and poured them out with some ceremony in a neat row on the bar top. She set them down on flat cork disks with the phrase “God Created Men and Women but Sam Colt Made Them Equal” printed around the edge. They raised their glasses in mutual salute and set them down again, Dalton eyeing the framed shot of Jane Fonda. Katie followed his glance and grinned.
“Named the place after her,” she said, a bit redundantly. “She and her husband at the time — that network guy, got close-set beady eyes—”
“Ted Turner?”
“They were looking to buy a spread over there near the Wagon Box fight.”
“You figured naming the place after her would bring in the celebrity trade?” asked Dalton.
“Hell no. But I figured it would sure keep her away.”
“Katie’s husband was a chopper pilot in Vietnam,” said Fremont. The “was” needed no elaboration, and no one offered it.
After a silence, Dalton made a point of admiring the Huey models over the bar, and Katie plucked one down and handed it to him, a large version of the Huey made out of what had at one time been a can of black powder.
“You can keep that one,” said Katie, finding much to approve of in Micah Dalton, her appreciation for him blatantly physical. “Maybe it’ll bring you back sooner. What brings you boys to Dayton, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“We were hoping to use your phone,” said Fremont. “We want to go up to see Pete, but we don’t want to just drop in unannounced. He won’t answer his phone unless he knows the caller ID, so we figure if—”
Katie’s expression became uneasy, even guarded.
“Pete’s lit out for the Territories, we figure. Nobody’s heard from him in two weeks. I got worried after calling him a few times, drove up to his cabin last Friday, place was deserted, doors locked down, windows shuttered. His truck is gone, and both his dogs too.”
“When’s the last time you spoke to him directly?”
But her suspicions had been aroused by the question. “You two don’t look so good. What’s up?”
“We’re a little concerned—” began Dalton, but she raised a hand to stop him.
“No offense, Micah, but I don’t know you real well yet. Willard, before you ask me any more about Pete, maybe you can tell me why you two look so damn worried about him?”
Fremont looked at Dalton, who shrugged and said nothing.
“We think Pete might be in some kind of trouble. It could be that somebody is looking for him, and we—”
“The Indian?”
Their reaction was impossible to miss, and she frowned at them. “Last time I saw Pete he was in here — maybe the second of October — had a couple of drinks, all cooped up in the booth at the back there, sitting with his eye on the door, and he was carrying that big old Ruger of his. He looked like he had a lot on his mind. I left him alone for a time, till the place emptied out, and then I sat down to have a beer with him. We talked about this and that and then he asks me if I had seen anybody new in Dayton, was anybody asking for him? Nobody was and I told him so, but this didn’t seem to settle him. I asked him what kind of trouble he was in and he said it was no big thing but if I happened to see a big man, looked like an Indian, with long gray hair down to his shoulders and lots of Navajo silver on him, well he’d appreciate it if I were to give him a call up there in his cabin. Last time I talked to him, and that was” — she glanced at a calendar behind the bar — “that was thirteen days ago now. I called him a few times since but never got an answer. Left messages but he never picked up.”
Fremont’s face had been closing down during this report, and Dalton’s passive expression did not hide his growing concern from her.
“Okay, I said my piece. How about you two fill me in?”
Fremont opened his mouth to speak but Dalton cut in.
“You know anything about Pete’s past, Katie?”
“I know he did government work. He never went into details. We don’t push people on their past around here. It’s not polite.”
“It’s possible that someone from Pete’s working years has gone off the rails and it may be that he’s out looking for him. This man would be tall, well built, in his late seventies, a man who’s seen a lot of outdoor work, but he wouldn’t necessarily look like an Indian. He might look like retired military. Have you seen anyone like that?”
“Without you narrow it down a bit, you just described half the old men in the Powder River country. But we know most of them. Wyoming’s only got one person for every five hundred square miles, so strangers get noticed. I talked to some of Pete’s friends around here, and he asked them the same favor, to let them know if they saw anybody like the man he described to me. Same man you described. But nobody has seen him. Just what is it you do for a living, Micah?”