Brown-Eyed Girl (25 page)

Danny Crease was in the ranch house kitchen drinking coffee and reading
Soldier of Fortune
, about to be served pancakes and bacon by Elroy's dim but suitably reactionary wife. Elroy told him about the thefts and the shooting, and sent him to the bunkhouses to see who was missing. He went straight to Shane and Dirtbag's cabin, where there was of course no sign of the former, and the latter was still sleeping heavily, making a sound like a wrecking ball working on an old Vegas casino. Danny smacked him hard. Dirtbag snorted twice and turned over, curling up in his bunk like a kitten. Drugged.

“It was Shane,” said Danny, annoyed to find upon returning that Arthur Stopes had joined Elroy at the table and had taken Danny's place and was tucking into his breakfast. Mrs. Foote, who didn't like scenes, gave Danny another plate and went upstairs to take a Valium.

“How did he get out?” Arthur wondered.

“He must have slipped Dirtbag an elephant trank. Bastard's still zoned out.”

“So what do we do?” asked Elroy, excusing both the use of personal names and the profanity in this time of crisis.

“What have they got? Your car. If they find a bullet, they can potentially identify your gun, provided they also find the gun. Crimes were committed with your property.
Stolen
property,” Arthur explained.

Danny stuffed a piece of bacon in his mouth, chewed hard, took a scalding sip of boiled coffee. “Figure they also have Shane's prints off the car, which they can match since he has a sheet. They make him as their only suspect within a few hours. If they find him and take him, he's liable to talk to cut a deal. You think a couple of state cops showing up today is bad—we'll have the FBI crawling all over this place in a week.”

Elroy did not at all like the idea of the FBI invading his private property, let alone finding out what he had stashed up at Freedom Ranch. He could, of course, see that the various convicted felons currently on the place scattered before the police arrived. And it was not in all cases illegal for private citizens to possess the kinds of armaments he had managed to purchase from various offshore entrepreneurs. But he knew that it was frowned upon. He admired militia heroes like Randy Weaver, but considered himself too rich for martyrdom, or even bad publicity. “So we have to try to find Parker before they do,” he acknowledged, mentally excommunicating Shane from the U.S. with the mere mention of his actual last name.

“Give me your plane, Mr. Foote. I want to fly down to Laramie and see if I can't pick up a trail. If I can get to him before the cops find him, I'll shut him up for good,” Danny said, looking scary.

“But in the meantime, Number One,” Arthur cut in, “it's important that you make some explanation to the police. They'll call back any minute. Perhaps you might say that one of the men you hired on a temporary basis, say, to help pull cattle out of snowdrifts, is missing.”

“Not bad, Arthur.” Danny smiled nastily. “Give them Shane's description and a fictitious name, phony social security number, all that. Obviously, he fed you a line, then ripped you off. It'll keep them busy until I can get to the little pencil-dick. We should have taken him down when he screwed up the Dunwoodie job.”

Arthur nodded sadly. “We must do what we can to rectify the mistake, even as we construct a position that enables us to restore security.”

“What the hell does that mean, Art?” Danny sneered.

“It means we step on it. And it means”—Elroy fixed a steely stare on Danny—“that when you carry out the sentence, you must under no circumstances leave witnesses or evidence that might implicate the Unknown Soldiers or in any way jeopardize our mission.”

“With all due respect, Mr. Foote,” Danny said, choosing bluntness, “we're up to our ass in implications. But if it makes you feel better, I promise not to waste him when anyone's watching.”

“See that you don't. I'll call the state police back. You,” he said, indicating Danny, “call my pilot and have him gas up the plane. Call a leasing outfit in Laramie and make sure they have a car waiting at the airport. Then, get a couple of men and wake up Number Seventeen to take him to the stockade for discipline. As soon as I'm done talking to the police”—Elroy nearly spat on the last word—“I'll call Number Two in Casper and brief him. I want him here before the police arrive. Now let's go!”

Shane was shaking hard by the time he got to to his place south of Albany, the mouse-infested, dilapidated dwelling that was all that remained of a once-thriving Parker family ranch. Halfway down the muddy, rutted driveway, the truck high-centered and stalled out. Somebody'd torn up the road since he'd driven the Pontiac in and out at Thanksgiving. Shane didn't feel like trying to get unstuck, so he trudged the rest of the way to the house. The front door creaked on its hinges, but thankfully didn't fall off as it had once before when he'd returned after a long absence. He was way too wired to have the patience to fix it, terminally too tired to have the strength, and it was maybe eight degrees above zero outside, tops.

His tongue felt as if it had been Velcroed to the roof of his mouth. He went to the kitchen, still piled with his dirty dishes from months ago, and found a glass. But when he turned on the tap, nothing happened. His pipes were frozen solid.

Now thirst was really getting hold of him. He'd have to melt snow. He found a saucepan, went outside, filled it with snow, and came back in to turn on the burner on the stove. Nothing again. Hadn't paid his propane bill since September. No gas.

Panic struck. His heart was pounding his chest so hard he wondered crazily if it would break his ribs. That meth had really done a number on him: He needed something to take the edge off it. Shane had once had a girlfriend who'd left a bottle of Librium in his bathroom. He considered it a “chick drug,” but this was an emergency. He went in the bathroom, carrying the saucepan, found the pills, ate five, and washed them down with a handful of snow. He was still shaking so hard his teeth hurt.

At least there was nice dry wood stacked next to the fireplace. He laid some logs on the grate. Grinding out the last of the speed rush, he rummaged through cobwebby cupboards until he found an ancient copy of
Reader's Digest.
He ripped it up ferociously, crumpled a bunch of pages, shoved them under the logs, and found his lighter. Amazingly, it occurred to him to open the flue before he flicked the Bic on the paper.

To his enormous relief, the fire roared to life at once, shooting up flames high into the chimney with a great whoosh. The room warmed right up, and Shane fell gratefully onto a couch that most people would have declined to touch without rubber gloves. The Libriums kicked in, his head spun hard twice, and he sank into unconsciousness. High in the chimney, which hadn't been cleaned in twenty years, the residues of a thousand dirty fires began to smolder, and the mortar between the bricks began to crumble. Sparks shot out high above the chimney top, showering fireproof asphalt shingles, except in the places where the shingles had fallen off the aging roof, exposing tar paper and even bare timbers. The chimney was going off like a roman candle as Shane lay senseless below, and some of the sparks caught on wood and paper and began to blaze. The Parker place was known for its great privacy. No one passed by to notice as the fire licked its way down from the roof to the studs, roared down walls, engulfed the house.

At eight a.m., when Sheriff Dickie Langham arrived at his office in the Albany County Courthouse and heard the news of the incident in Muddy Gap, he gave himself a good cussing out about not getting officers into position in time to have a chance to head off the suspect. The bad guy might very well be speeding along one of the roads in his jurisdiction, or holed up somewhere in his county, or, God forbid, committing another senseless crime upon some undeserving citizen. Dickie drank a cup of coffee, ate three donuts, smoked two Marlboros and put in a call to PeeWee Corkett, the investigating officer from the DCI. PeeWee had been an instructor at the law enforcement academy when Dickie was there, and he recalled PeeWee telling a memorable joke involving a can of BBs mistakenly poured into a blueberry pie. Dickie laughed in spite of himself.

“Glad to hear from you,” PeeWee told Dickie. “We've got a lab team taking prints off the Mercedes. They'll run the prints through the FBI computers and maybe come up with a match by the end of the day, if we're lucky. It's a bitch of a case in more ways than one. The car belongs to a rich shithead named Elroy Foote, who's claiming it was stolen by some drifter he'd hired recently, along with a Ruger automatic. Foote gave me the guy's name and social security number, but when we traced the number it turned out to be a phony.

“
Then
,” PeeWee continued, exasperated, “I got a call from some asshole lawyer in Casper who claimed to be Foote's ‘representative.' What's this with a guy having a representative? Must have too much money and not enough brains to pour piss out of a boot. Anyhow, this representative told me how much he appreciated the state's effort to retrieve Mr. Foote's stolen property, and how he hopes this whole affair will be handled with minimal invasion of Mr. Foote's privacy.”

Dickie was sympathetic. “A representative talking about privacy? You're gonna be wadin' through it on this one, PeeWee.”

“Tell me about it,” PeeWee said. “I explained to the lawyer that we'd do what we can to protect Mr. Foote's property
and
his privacy, but it was likely that a felony had been committed with a weapon registered to Mr. Foote, and a nineteen-year-old kid was seriously injured, and the perpetrator was still at large.”

“Was he impressed?” Dickie asked.

“No, but we're gonna go impress him. My partner and I are on our way up to Teton County to Foote's ranch. We'll scope things out and talk to Foote. I'm sure this Helwigsen fella, the representative, will be up there by the time we make it.”

Dickie cradled the phone between his ear and his shoulder, taking notes. “Well, we'll keep a lookout for your bad guy, PeeWee,” he said, wondering how in hell he'd do that. “What was that lawyer's name again?”

“Helwigsen,” said PeeWee, taking a puff off a Marlboro of his own and chasing it with a bite of a congealing Egg McMuffin. “Robert Helwigsen. Name ring a bell?” he asked.

Of course. “Yeah, it does. Let me make some calls. I'll let you know if we come up with anything.”

“Likewise,” said PeeWee.

Danny Crease arrived at Brees Field in Laramie not much after noon and instructed Foote's pilot to wait at the airport until he returned. A car rented to Freedom Ranch was, of course, waiting for him. He drove down route 130 to the intersection with 230, headed southwest. One of the Unknown Soldiers had been to Shane's place once (getting high, he didn't admit) so Danny knew where to go.

Two miles from the turnoff to the dirt road that led to the Parker place, Danny saw the smoke. Even with the windows closed and the heater on, he smelled it. He turned into a torn-up mud driveway he didn't really want to take a rental car down, just in time to see the roof fall in, sparks and flame exploding all around. A ranch pickup with county 6 plates was mired some ways from what had once been a house but was now a roaring blaze. Danny parked his rental car, got out, and thought he smelled roasting meat. He couldn't be sure it was Shane—hell, for all he knew it could be a dog or an antelope—but then again, the fire had to have started somehow. If the asshole had burned himself up alive, it just saved Danny the trouble of killing him. Sparks were falling on the trees around the cabin, hissing out on wet, snowy branches. Given the amount of smoke, fire trucks would show up eventually, and Danny didn't want to be around when they did.

Danny got back in the car, heading for the airport, then realized that he might as well take his time. In fact, he decided he'd grab a motel and stay the night. There was no reason for him to be at Elroy's place when the state troopers showed up. Why not drive around Laramie, do a little reconnaissance? He still meant to exact payment of the debt Dickie Langham owed him. Maybe he'd stop for lunch at Foster's Country Corner where, he knew from experience, the customer was always right. On his way back into town, a Laramie fire engine screamed by, siren blaring, headed the other way. It was followed by an Albany County sheriff's car, lights flashing. Danny drove on, grinning.

Chapter 25
Putting Out Fires

Bobby had just finished a grueling duel with the ButtBlaster when his cellular telephone chirped. He liked to get to the gym early and be pumped up and gleaming with sweat by the time the babes walked by the strength-training area, on the way to the sunrise step aerobics class. He'd met some interesting women that way. Well, maybe not interesting, but you could count on their knowing exactly what percentage of body fat they were carrying, and it was always within the acceptable range.

It was Elroy calling, and for once he was showing the kind of real discretion the cellphone required. “There's been a robbery at my ranch,” he explained in a flat voice. “A vehicle and a weapon have been taken. A temporary employee is missing, and so is the gun. The car was found by the state police in a remote location, where someone was apparently shot. Two Department of Criminal Investigations officers are coming to Freedom Ranch tomorrow to investigate, and I want you to be here when they arrive. I am, of course, eager that my privacy and my property rights be respected to the greatest extent, and I would prefer to minimize my own personal involvement in the matter. As my legal representative, it will be your job to remind the police of those rights.”

“Let me check my calendar, see what I can rearrange, and I'll get back to you.”

“I
am
your calendar, boy,” Elroy said. Bobby had to admit that with what he'd been billing the Foote account, Elroy had a point.

“Right. I'm sure I can clear my schedule,” Bobby continued, sweat dripping off his face and onto his phone. “I'll charter a plane and fly to Jackson. Have someone meet me.”

“Affirmative,” said Elroy, slipping dangerously into U.S. jargon. “Get here as soon as you can so I can brief you.”

“Of course,” Bobby soothed, wiping off the phone with a towel and trying to calm Elroy's fraying nerves. “Why don't you give me the name and number of the officer you talked to, and I'll call and let him know he'll be dealing with me.”

Elroy did so, then told Bobby, “Plan to be here a couple of days. We have several matters to discuss.”

“At your service, sir,” Bobby answered, trying to mask irritation with obsequiousness. They signed off and he sat staring at the phone in his hand.

He could just imagine what had happened. Some goddamn ranch hand had gone on a toot, grabbed a truck and snagged one of the countless guns Elroy owned, probably gotten into a tussle with somebody he picked up in a bar, and now a couple of traffic cops were about to violate Elroy's sacred property rights. It probably wasn't any of the half-dozen Unknown Soldiers who were staying at the ranch. Most of them were either too straight or too far gone to imagine stealing from Elroy. The only Soldiers there who were capable of such a thing were Danny Crease, who was far too calculating, and Shane Parker, who had Dirtbag sitting on him, probably literally by this time. Well, Elroy paid Bobby plenty for the privilege of having him sweat the small stuff, so he'd spend some more Foote money rushing to the rescue.

So much for the hot Friday night Bobby had planned. He finally had a date with Brittany Langham. Bobby had managed to get her pager number, and he'd called a dozen times since The Millionaires' Ball, but she'd only called back twice. The first time, the day after it had become public knowledge that he was handling the lawsuit against the Dunwoodie bequest, she'd told him she didn't have time to see him. He asked her if she was shining him on because of her father being friends with Sally Alder. She said no, she didn't give a damn about that, she was just pretty busy. The second time she'd called back she was friendlier, for her. What she said was, if he kept calling her, she'd probably break down and go out with him just to get him to stop bugging her. He'd said he'd come down to Laramie and take her out to dinner and dancing. She'd said, “Okay,” and he'd pounced on it.

He'd thought that by now the Dunwoodie thing would be over, that the University would cave in at the first hint of bad publicity, or that the Foundation officers might be flexible. At the very least, he believed Sally Alder would decide that spending winter in Laramie wasn't so much fun that it was worth the hassle of battling her fellow professors for the right to hang around and freeze. If any one of those things had happened, Bosworth and his fellow plaintiffs would get what they wanted, Elroy would think he'd knocked out one more radical sniper's nest in Wyoming, and Bobby would have made some nice change for basically no work. To his amazement, they'd all stood firm. The University counsel had called him up and rejected the deal he'd outlined, explaining that the Foundation officers had no interest in altering provisions of a valid will, and that the University intended to accept the Foundation's offer.

According to the
Boomerang,
Foundation lawyer Ezra Sonnenschein said that, “These were the terms Meg Dunwoodie explicitly outlined to me, and we see no legal or ethical alternative to fulfilling the letter and the spirit of her most generous bequest to the university. The Foundation trustees are particularly eager that work already under way, including the cataloguing of the Dunwoodie papers and research on the biography, be completed in a professional and timely fashion by Professor Alder.”

Sally Alder told the
Boomerang
, “Anyone who wants to get me out of the Dunwoodie Chair had better blow up a bomb under it.” Bobby hated to think that there were a few people among his personal acquaintances who could easily be induced to do so.

He
really
didn't feel like pursuing the matter further. In fact, he'd called Bosworth and advised him to abandon the lawsuit. Couldn't a really motivated group of petty, spiteful professors make Sally Alder's life in Laramie so miserable that she'd just go away? Bosworth was offended at the idea of dropping the suit. He kept Bobby on the phone for half an hour of very expensive billable time (on Elroy's nickel, of course), pontificating about the principle of the thing. By the time Bobby got off the phone with Bosworth, he was sick enough of pompous academics that he'd called Elroy and told him he was wasting his money on the UW matter. Then he got another half hour of blab about Elroy's daddy and his friends Shep Parker and Mac Dunwoodie, more drivel about the principle of the thing, and for good measure, a lecture on the universities as battlegrounds for hearts and minds. Bobby was a lawyer through and through, but even he reached a point where he began to wonder why he'd chosen a career that required spending so much time listening to assholes.

So he still had the lawsuit, which he was pretty sure wasn't worth pursuing (he, for one, didn't give even a tick's ass where the University of Wyoming got its money, so long as the least amount of it possible came out of his own pocket). And now he had this ranch hand business.

He tried to be optimistic. Maybe it would distract Elroy from his paramilitary adventures for a while.

Bobby called Brit's pager, selected the message option and left word that something very important had come up, and he had to break their date. Then he closed up his phone, put it in his gym bag, slung the towel around his neck, and reminded himself that no matter how much he had to put up with now, the payoff could eventually be astronomical. Lots of people got paid a whole lot less to listen to assholes; waitresses and cops, for example. He thought briefly about calling the DCI, but then looked up to find Miss Casper Hardbody standing over him, smiling slightly. “Are you done with the Butt-Blaster?” she asked sweetly.

Bobby wiped off the machine with his towel and smiled back, flicking a glance at her iron butt. “Blast away,” he replied warmly. He could call the cops from the car.

Delice Langham was using her charm on Steve Baca, Laramie's new fire chief, as he hassled her about the permit for her newly constructed brick pizza oven. She had so intimidated the regular fire inspector that Baca had decided he'd go and take her on himself. He didn't half mind, being new in town, recently divorced, and susceptible to tight jeans, black hair, and the jangle of silver jewelry.

“I'm not just nit-picking here, Miss Langham,” Chief Baca said, stroking his handsome mustache and looking sweetly serious. “This is a hundred-year-old, heavily timbered building. You have just installed something called a ‘wood-burning oven.' Does that strike you as a potential problem?”

Delice had a weakness for firemen, who were always in great shape and always had cute mustaches. She considered Steve Baca a very promising prospect, but she wasn't going to let him win this one. “My chef and manager assure me that every penny-ante tourist town in the West has a hundred-year-old building with an upscale restaurant in it, and every single one of those places has a brick oven. This building's mostly brick anyhow. For heaven's sake, chief,” she added demurely, closing in on her best argument, “do you know what kind of business was in this building in 1883?”

“No ma'am,” said Baca, “but I bet you do.”

“I looked it up in the city directory for that year,” Delice told him, inspecting her nails with a small smug smile, then raising her eyes to Baca's. “Swensen's Blacksmith's Shop and Stable. Open fires, hot coals, dry straw, nervous horses, and the nearest running water at a pump a half-block away. If Swensen's hot horseshoes couldn't burn this place down, do you think a designer pizza can?”

Baca gave her a wry look, shaking his head. “I'll have to give it some thought.”

Delice was just about to suggest that he call her by her first name, and do his thinking over dinner at her house some night, when the radio on his belt screeched. Two engines had been dispatched to a house fire south of Albany. Baca radioed back to ask for directions, received them, excused himself and ran out to his truck.

“Damnation!” exclaimed Delice, the minute Baca was out of earshot. She recognized the location. The old Parker place, a ranch she'd been thinking about as a potential historic site. The house was falling down, but could be stabilized, even reconstructed. It had the potential to be a fantastic example of late nineteenth-century ranch culture. Delice was well aware that Meg Dunwoodie's mother had grown up on the Albany ranch, and she'd halfhoped to persuade Sally to get the Dunwoodie Foundation to buy the place and have it restored.

Despite what she had been saying not three minutes before, Delice knew precisely how fast a fire could scream through an old building. The Parker ranch house could have been burning for a while before anyone noticed and called it in, and it could very well be beyond saving. Still, she thought, even destruction was history in the making. She pulled out the cellphone that Burt had insisted she get, punched in Sally's number. Sally answered on the second ring. “I'm coming to get you,” she said. “We're going to watch a fire.”

By the time Delice and Sally got to Albany, the blaze was pretty much out. There was a pickup truck stuck halfway down the road, and the fire engines had had to crash through brush to get around it. Firefighters had pumped water from a tank truck onto what was left of the house, and were now searching the smoldering, blackened ruin that had once been the Parker ranch for any sign of human remains. Dickie Langham and a deputy were banging in stakes and stringing crime scene tape around an area that clearly included the pickup. Delice and Sally parked and got out of Delice's Explorer just in time to hear Steve Baca yell to Dickie, “Call the coroner's office and have them get a van out here. We found something.”

Dickie had just hung up his own cellphone, after informing PeeWee Corkett that they'd found the Barnes truck. He'd secured the scene and called in the state crime lab, but he'd be willing to bet that the prints they'd found on the Mercedes belonged to one Shane Parker, the repeat offender at whose residence the truck had been parked. The residence in question was now history, Dickie told PeeWee, and so, possibly, was Parker. According to the fire chief, Steve Baca, it looked like the fire had started in the chimney. Half the people in Wyoming who burned wood were unaware that they had to get their chimneys swept on a regular basis, with the result that chimney fires were a common cause of property loss, injury, and death in the state. Obviously, though, somebody had started a fire in the fireplace, and it was logical to assume that it was Parker himself.

PeeWee, sitting in his office in Casper, thanked Dickie for the information. “At least someone around here is interested in figuring out this mess.”

“What do you mean?” asked Dickie.

“I just got a call from my commander,” PeeWee began, obviously annoyed by interference from his superiors. “He told me that he'd had a call from somebody from the governor's office, who'd heard that we were going up to Freedom Ranch to investigate a crime, and he warned me to be careful to respect Mr. Foote's privacy. He reminded me that it was my job to see that Mr. Foote wasn't doubly victimized, first by the robbery and then by the police. Sounds like that damn lawyer called in some favors.”

Helwigsen again. Dickie really wanted to talk to Sam Branch. And to Brit. “Somebody put the squeeze on,” said Dickie. “Have fun.”

“Laugh a minute,” PeeWee said. “Does it strike you that this Foote is playing it pretty defensive for a crime victim?”

“Well what do you expect from a reclusive billionaire?” Dickie asked him.

PeeWee laughed. “Yeah, you're right. He's probably got his own private dungeon out back for people who tangle with him.”

“Later,” Dickie signed off, catching sight of Delice and Sally. “What the hell are you girls doing here?” Dickie asked Delice.

“The Historic Preservation Commission has been thinking about doing a site application for this place for the National Register. I just happened to be talking to Chief Baca when the call came in about the fire. I thought Sally would want to come along to see the last days of Meg Dunwoodie's mother's house, if you really want to know. We won't get in your way,” she added, backing off a little.