Bone Fire (18 page)

“I’m glad you did.”

She turned in the seat and pressed a hand up against the wire mesh separating the front seat from the back, then looked at him.

“This your first ride in one of these?”

She nodded.

“Go on ahead and put your seatbelt on,” he said, backing them around and thinking about driving out north with the windows down, through the troughs of cool air holding tight against the sloughs along the roadway, thinking that might put her at ease. But he didn’t know if she was crazy, in which case it’d be better to have her in the office, even if it scared her a little.

“I almost didn’t come over tonight. I almost just went back to Denver.”

“You’re doing the right thing,” he said.

“Anyway, I don’t sleep hardly ever. I’m up all the time.”

“Yeah, that’s me too.”

When he crossed the bridge east of town, a night hatch came up out of the willows along the river and the insects pocked the windshield like puffs of ash.

“I guess the fish’ll be biting on those bugs tomorrow.” She tried to make it sound conversational, like they knew each other.

“I don’t know the first thing about fishing,” he said. “Sometimes I act like I do, but I don’t.”

“My stepdad took me.”

“I met him.”

“Benton?” She turned to look at him in the dashlights. She was fingering the ring in her lip.

“Your mother too.”

“Kayla just said you called and were looking for me.”

He turned onto the main drag and hit the switch to spray washing fluid over the windshield, the wiperblades streaking the insects across the glass. When he noticed the car idling in front of the office, he pulled into the lot next to the drugstore.

They sat staring across the street at the building, a bleak institutional green except for the northwest corner, now weathered down to the gray cinderblock. A raised “R” had fallen off the sign above the door:
ISHAWOOA CO. SHE IFF OFFICE
. Then Starla reeled out onto the front stoop with two younger women, all hanging onto and shushing one another between bursts of laughter. They loaded into her ’93 Pontiac, and she backed out and drove off. Crane pulled across the street and parked and got out, but the girl didn’t even open her door.

“It’s all right,” he said. “We’re just going in here to talk. I’m not going to lock you up.”

She walked with him past the lighted cubicle where the night dispatch sat.

“Evening, Pearl,” he said.

She looked up from her crossword-puzzle book, pink plastic barrettes in her gray hair, her hands thin and liver-spotted. “I had nothing to do with it,” she said.

“Never entered my mind.” He continued down the hallway, the girl following just a step behind.

“Did you know those people?” She was whispering.

“The tall one works dispatch during the day.” He threw the keys on his desk and dropped into his chair. “Every once in a while she and her buddies get shitfaced and come in to fire up the Breathalyzer and see what they blow. Like a competition.”

“Nice.” She stepped to the window beside the door and put up the blind, staring at the jail cells across the hall. “I’m not tweaking anymore.” She turned, hugging herself. “I been in rehab. That’s where I was when you were trying to find me.”

“I’m going to need to know what happened to your boyfriend,” he said, motioning toward the chair across from him.

She sat down, sucking on her lip ring. “If I start crying you shouldn’t worry about it,” she said. “I cry more than I used to.”

“That won’t bother me.”

She was knitting and releasing her fingers now, over and over, and when she saw him watching she laid her hands out on her thighs. “I didn’t have to come up here. Nobody made me. I was doing real good in rehab.”

“I understand that.”

“It was an accident.”

“All right.”

She looked over her shoulder.

“You want me to close the door?”

She nodded, so he got up and swung the door shut and returned to his desk.

She started to cry quietly. “I swear I didn’t know Brady had a gun.” She was staring at the floor. “I don’t think JC knew either.”

“You mean Brady Croonquist?” He tried to keep his voice natural, as she had when talking about what bugs a fish might rise to. “Jake Croonquist’s son?”

“I don’t know what his daddy’s name is.” She pulled her sleeve down over her hand and wiped her eyes with it. “Brady owns a ranch. I know that.”

“Was it his trailer?”

“He said it was safe, that nobody could come on his place without
permission. But his house isn’t anywhere near the trailer. It’s way back up the creek from there.”

“I know where it is.”

“I was only there once. At his house.”

She held her hands up over her eyes and started to sob, rocking out over her knees. He walked a box of Kleenex around to her, setting it on the floor beside her chair and sitting back against the desk.

“You’re saying Brady’s the one cooking the stuff?”

She blew her nose, holding the used tissue in her lap. “It was JC and me, but Brady showed us how.”

“He set you up?”

“Yeah, but for a long time Brady just bought whatever anybody stole. So they’d have money if they needed to get high. Like he’d buy stereos or guns or computers, whatever. He’s got a barn full. JC used to help him take loads of it up to Billings to sell. One time they drove a truckload down to Denver.” She blew her nose again. “Brady used to always say he didn’t make nothing but profit, then a couple months ago he said he might as well make
all
the profit. That’s when JC and me started cooking for him.”

“I can’t help you if you’re going to lie to me.”

“I’m not lying.” Her eyes sparked, and then she remembered where she was. She looked to make sure the door was still shut. “I swear I’m not.”

“And nobody else was out there?”

“Just JC and me, and when Brady drove up I even waved to him through the window. Then there was this explosion and JC was on the floor, on fire and screaming. It knocked me down too, but I didn’t catch fire.” She was crying hard again.

He walked back around his desk and sat down. “It counts for something that you came all the way up here,” he said. “You’re sure you weren’t the one with the gun?”

She was sniffling and shaking her head. She wiped at her eyes. “Brady’ll kill me if he finds out I told you.”

“Nobody’s going to find out.”

She pushed her hair away from her face. “I just came up for my stuff. When I left I didn’t take nothing, not my clothes or anything. I left it all with my girlfriend.” She was trembling. “I don’t know why we even done it,” she said. “Mostly they cook it over on the reservation.” She was standing now, and he stood up too. “I don’t mean the Indians. They don’t. It’s other people from someplace else, and they sell it to the Indians and everywhere off the reservation, and Brady could’ve just bought it from them.” She pointed to the jail cells through the window across the hallway. “Can I go in there?”

“If you want.”

He stood outside the bars while she went in and sat down on a cot, hugging herself again like she was cold.

“You think you’re done with meth?”

“I’m trying to be,” she said. “You only got these four cells?”

“That’s it.”

Under the fluorescent lighting her face appeared hollowed, ghostly.

“I guess that’s all you need.” She tried to smile. “Unless you have to lock up your dispatcher and her friends.”

“Harley weekend’s a bonanza,” he said. “And the Fourth of July Rodeo.” He felt a wave of nausea rise and looked away, waiting for it to pass. He was careful when he swallowed. “You got any place to go?” he asked.

“I’m going back to Denver if you let me. My sister got me a job washing dishes at the restaurant where she works. She’s helping me study for my GED.”

“Come on out of there.”

She followed him back to his office. “Will I have to come back up here? To testify or something?”

“We’ll have to wait and see what you need to do. I’ll talk to the county attorney.”

“What time is it?”

He pointed at the clock on the wall. It was one-thirty.

“That was my girlfriend’s car I was driving,” she said. “She’ll need it for work in the morning.”

He took a form out of the file cabinet and handed it to her with a pen. “I want you to write out a statement,” he said. “Just what you told me about JC and Brady, and your sister’s address if that’s where you’re staying.”

She scooted the chair up to the corner of the desk. “Do you have a dictionary?”

“Just do the best you can.”

“My bus leaves out of Sheridan at three-fifteen.”

They both looked at the clock again.

“I’ll take you down there,” he said. “We’ll swing by and get your girlfriend’s car and drop that off, then I’ll run you down to Sheridan. We can get something to eat if you want. If you’re hungry.”

“Doesn’t your wife mind you working all night?”

“Not so much.” He pointed at the form. “Make sure everything’s printed out clear. So I can read it real easy.”

She bent over the lined, white paper, her tongue working at the ring in her lip.

H
E WAS GOOD
at paying attention. McEban only had to show him how to do something once and that was it, and he’d gone over the Google map twice and it really wasn’t that far. Most of the dogs had been brought in for the night or were tied up in their yards, so he didn’t have to worry about mean dogs that might bite, and for the first few blocks he was having fun.

He made believe all his warriors were holding steady behind him, relying on his superior scouting abilities. He listened for enemy movement, creeping along on his belly, on his hands and knees where the cover was better. All the hedges and bushes were grown up, and he nudged the basketball forward, butting it with the top of his head. He wished he’d thought to draw a friendly face on it before he left the house, like Tom Hanks had on his volleyball in
Cast Away
.

He made it undiscovered through the park and around the lake and into a yard on the corner of Shield and North Fourth. He was surprised how many streetlamps were burned out, and a lot of the ones still working cast a weak, fuzzy yellow light. The big thing to watch out for was headlights. Mainly cops’ headlights, but also people who were good citizens and might call the cops. He didn’t think drunks and college students posed the same kind of threat. If they spotted him they might just shake their heads, not believing
an Indian scout had flashed in front of their car in the middle of the night, and anyway, he was small for his age, which was good, because white people didn’t get as tense and worried around kids as they did around grownup Indians. Sort of like you were just the cub of an animal that was going to grow up and be dangerous, but you were still more cuddly than vicious, and then he thought about something stalking
him
in the dark. Some bloodthirsty demon prowling around looking for kids to grab and rip their hearts out before they could even scream. He got so revved up he couldn’t shut his mind down, like he’d had three Mountain Dews in a row.

When he got to Third, which was the main street downtown, there were a few people out on the sidewalks and a lot more cars, so he wasn’t as worried about the demon realm. Then he remembered the story he’d heard about a college student who got beaten to death here because he was gay, and he wasn’t completely sure he wasn’t. He’d asked McEban, who said it was all wiring and he’d know soon enough, and when he asked how he’d know, McEban said if he was gay he’d get a hard-on when he looked at boys, and if not, then girls would do the trick. He was under the one-ton changing out the universal joint, and Kenneth was afraid to say that almost everything gave him a hard-on, but then McEban must have thought of it by himself, or remembered what it was like when he was a kid. He scooted out from underneath the truck and lay there looking up. “You’re just fine,” he said, “either way.”

He snuck along, crouching from car to car where they were parked at the curb, finally crossing Third on Sully, still north of most of the bars that were open this late. When he reached the far curb he heard a siren and stuffed his basketball up under his T-shirt, tucking it into his jeans, and ran as fast as he could for a block and a half, across a big vacant lot and out through a stretch of gravel and over some railroad tracks. He knelt under a parked train of flatbeds and stockcars, looking back across the empty lot
and finally realizing the siren must have been for someone else. He was sucking at the air.

The odors of creosote and diesel and something he didn’t recognize were so strong they made his eyes burn. When he crawled out the other side, looking up at the boxcar he’d been hiding under, he counted four tiers of pigs packed in tight. They were all grunting and shifting, slobbering and shitting, and he remembered Westerns he’d seen on television where the good guys stampeded hundreds of cattle to cover their escape, and pigs would be just as good if he could climb up and pry away the locks and slide the gates open. Then the empty tracks filled with the rumble of an approaching train, and a yellow Union Pacific engine was chugging toward him. He trotted along the shoulder of Railroad Street until he hit Lyons and turned west. The basketball bouncing under his shirt made him think of Curtis Hanson’s beer belly. He kept running until he was across the street from an auto-parts store, and pressed the button on the side of his wristwatch to make the face glow. McEban had given him the watch and now it was only two in the morning, and the Greyhound station was supposed to be in the office of the auto-parts store, and here he was without anything having ripped his heart out.

When he looked in the window, there was only the man standing behind the counter and a woman sitting in a chair, nobody else, and he knew he needed to get lucky. He sat down between two cars at the edge of the parking lot to wait. He was still so keyed up that he wasn’t worried about falling asleep. He took one of the sandwiches out of his backpack and tore it in half, saving the rest for later. Then a car pulled through and a long-haired guy got out, saying thanks to whoever dropped him off, and went into the office. About fifteen minutes after that a pickup parked and the driver stood leaning against the sidewall smoking and finally slid a suitcase out of the bed and went inside. Kenneth followed right behind, slipping into a chair by the door, watching as he bought his ticket.