Plains Crazy (8 page)

The street was, surprise, empty. She got on her bike and started burning off her anger in an effort to calm down enough for her next errand. She was half a block short of Main when the bank did an imitation of Mount St. Helens. She almost crashed getting the bike stopped and turning around to see what had exploded. Clouds of smoke belched from the bank and filled the sky with something that looked like dry leaves, rectangular dry leaves—the greenback variety.

***

The sheriff thought Bud Stone looked like he belonged in one of those lodges in that circle out on the prairie. The man had the cheekbones for it, and the complexion. His skin was weathered and wrinkled, but every wrinkle had probably been earned mastering an environment just like this one. His dark eyes seemed to see through the trucks and trailers and RVs, through the artificial windrows and fence lines beyond, even past the occasional distant elevator right back to a short-grass prairie filled with the great herds—a place he and those lodges belonged.

Stone had changed into blue jeans and a light cotton shirt with a western cut in a bright floral pattern. His boots had pointed toes, but no fancy stitching. He wore a baseball cap with an embroidered patch that read LUCKY STAR CASINO, and his gray braids hung neatly over both shoulders. He sat in a picnic chair under an awning beside one of the RVs and sipped a cup of coffee. The sheriff took the chair next to him.

“Mr. Stone,” the sheriff said. “My deputy tells me you have a rotten alibi or a twisted sense of humor.”

“Don't have much of either. Do I need them?”

Stone hadn't turned to look at him. He just continued to stare across the pasture into infinity. Or maybe he was trying to avoid looking at the stuffed buffalo, now leaning casually against the side of a semi trailer a few feet away.

“Alibis are always handy when there's been a murder. But you're hardly alone if you don't have one. Not many here do. As for a sense of humor, seems to me it'd be hard to survive without one.”

The sheriff tried a smile on the old man and got no response. “So, Deputy Wynn says you were with one of your grandfathers when Michael Ramsey died?”

“Yes.”

The sheriff waited, letting the silence lengthen. He was in a hurry, but he sensed that his time constraints didn't mean a thing to Stone.

“That's what I told that deputy. He didn't understand how that could be, since my grandfather died more than a century ago.”

“In a dream,” the sheriff said. He remembered how Mad Dog would put it. “Your spirit left your body and traveled to be with him?”

The old man finally turned and looked at the sheriff. “You aren't like your deputy. Are you a person?”

Through Mad Dog, the sheriff knew Cheyenne believed only those who had existed as the original people when the world began could be people again. People had spirits. They were recognizable by their deeds. The spirits of people were reborn, over and over. The rest of the world's teeming population weren't people, they were just meat. It wasn't a world view he was completely comfortable with, whether he qualified as a person or not.

“Yeah, I'm a person. So's my deputy,” the sheriff said. “Just not a very alert one. I'm not always alert either, but now and then I hear what someone tells me. And, if you mean am I
Tsistsistas
, then the answer is barely.”

“Ahh,” Stone said, something coming to life in the depths of his eyes. “You are the Mad Dog's Englishman.”

Normally, the sheriff would have explained his dislike for that nickname, and asked the old man not to use it. But, somehow, on this man's lips it sounded more like a compliment. “You know about my brother and me?”

“I have heard that there are men here who may be distant relatives. One of them might wish to serve the spirit world. That is part of the reason I came. My people, we decided, if PBS was going to do this, one of us needed to see that they did it…” He paused for a moment, looking for the right word. “…with respect,” he continued, having, the sheriff thought, found exactly the one he wanted.

“Your brother has come to Oklahoma to try to make contact with me, or one of the other old men. I am afraid we avoided him. There are many who seek wisdom for the wrong reasons. They are not people. Among the
Tsistsistas
, some are willing to sell our secrets, even when they don't really know them. The ones who do that, they are not people either. We encounter real people in search of truths so seldom. In your brother's case, we may have been wrong. Or so my grandfather tells me.”

“Mad Dog will be delighted to speak with you. And I'd love to be there to listen. But right now, I've got a murder to investigate.”

The old man nodded. “I see. You have
not
chosen to serve the spirit world. At least not yet.”

The sheriff allowed himself a self-conscious laugh. “My brother has had some astounding insights. He's told me things that turned out to be accurate, and there's no rational way to explain how he could know them. But he's the natural-born shaman in our family, not me. Philosophically, I'm…Well, I don't know what I am. Undecided, I suppose. But I'm sheriff of this county and we have a dead body. What I'm serving right now is the law. And what I need are answers. Who wanted to kill Michael Ramsey? And why?”

“Before you find answers, sometimes you must first ask the right questions.”

The sheriff shook his head. This was like talking to Mad Dog when he was doing his Zen Cheyenne thing.

Bud Stone smiled at the sheriff's confusion. Maybe he had a sense of humor after all.

“I do not think anyone wanted to kill Michael Ramsey,” Stone said. “That is what my grandfather was explaining before I was called back to this time and place.”

Despite the source, the concept was uncomfortably similar to the one the sheriff had already begun to consider. Mad Dog had been the target. Michael Ramsey was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The sheriff opened his mouth to ask Bud Stone if “Who might want to kill Mad Dog?” was the right question when his cell phone chirped.

“English,” he said into the receiver.

And just like that, the question changed.

Why would a terrorist pick on Buffalo Springs?

***

“Two words,” Jud Haines said. “Eminent domain.”

Chairman Wynn pushed his chair back from his desk and shook his head. “Hold on now,” he said. Those two words could lose him the next election.

“Damn right, hold on,” Supervisor Finfrock said. He leaned forward until he was on the edge of his seat, a worn leather sofa beneath the chairman's windows. “Folks vote Republican in Benteen County, not because they're conservative, though they are. It's more because they're libertarians, even if they don't know it. We go and seize somebody's land, even Mad Dog's, there'll be new faces on the board after the next election and they won't be ours.”

“Yeah,” the chairman agreed. “Take Mad Dog's land today, what's to keep you from coming after mine next? That's what they'll think.”

“We're talking a special case here,” Haines argued, pacing in front of the chairman's desk and swiping his blond mop out of his eyes. “I mean, let's face it. Mad Dog's the only one standing in the way of this wind farm. He's the reason the other two land owners haven't agreed to sell yet. They're sure we'll never get Mad Dog's land. Without it, our land isn't contiguous and we got no wind farm.”

“Wind blows the same damn speed everywhere in this county,” Finfrock said. Craig Finfrock was a short, muscular man with a flat nose he claimed was the result of an undistinguished boxing career. He owned the Bisonte Bar and Buffalo Springs' only liquor store. This might be Carrie Nation country, but decades after she wielded her ax it remained a profitable business. The chairman had watched it make Finfrock a wealthy man.

“Look here, Finfrock,” Jud Haines said. “Where else in this county are you going to find ten sections that line up east to west and aren't already controlled by one or two families? I mean, think about it. We don't put this together, somebody else will. One of those corporate farmers gets to thinking on this before we get the contract signed, they can go around us. Hook themselves up with Windreapers, or one of them other firms, and put this thing in themselves. Then, those of us who've invested in the Benteen Energy Coop can kiss our front money goodbye.”

“Persuasive argument,” Finfrock admitted. He was one of the larger investors. “But I still don't like this. Surely Mad Dog can be persuaded. I mean, he's a damn conservationist, right?”

“A conservationist? With oil wells on his property?” Haines scoffed. “Give me a break. And you've heard him criticize the president and the war in Iraq. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if Mad Dog was involved with OPEC or one of them other Communist fronts.”

The chairman leaned forward and rubbed his chin. The tone of this conversation troubled him. “Mad Dog is a lot of things,” he said, “pain in the ass being one of them, but he's no Communist.”

“Islamisist, then,” Haines countered. “Pretty much the same thing. Didn't you tell me Mad Dog claimed to be a Negro once? Spent time advocating Black power?”

“Yes, but…” The chairman had to admit it was so. Then Mad Dog had traded Black power for Rastafarianism, then the new-age crystal thing. And, of course, there was his hippie period and the grape boycott and…

“There you go,” Haines asserted. “Black power—Black Muslim, most likely. And this Cheyenne thing. Hell, it's probably a sham. He might be planning to strike at his neighbors with a suicide bomb or some such, now that our beloved U S of A is involved in a holy crusade against satanic Islam. I'll bet we could seize his land through the Patriot Act.”

Chairman Wynn had heard enough. Mad Dog might be a nut case, but he owed his own life to that nut. Probably his son's as well. He wasn't going to allow a quest for profit on a wind farm to turn into a witch hunt. He opened his mouth to protest, but the door opened first and his son stuck his uniformed body through it and smiled.

“You guys seen Mad Dog?” Wynn Junior asked.

The supervisors shook their heads.

“I was supposed to keep him here for Deputy Parker,” Junior continued, “only he seems to have slipped off. Oh, and did you hear about the pipe bomb here at the courthouse?”

Jaws dropped. Before anybody could respond, the windows rattled with the sound of an explosion.

“Lord,” the younger Wynn declared. “You don't suppose that could be another one?”

***

Slipping away from Wynn Some hadn't been hard, though Mad Dog's initial attempt to follow Deputy Parker through the back door was blocked.

“No siree Bob,” Deputy Wynn had told him. “Parker said to keep you here and that's what I aim to do.”

Mad Dog knew Wynn well enough not to argue. But he intended to make sure Hailey was all right. “Okay, then,” Mad Dog said. “I'll go wait in the office with Mrs. Kraus while you keep Parker's back covered.”

Wynn had squared his shoulders and looked proud about securing Parker's back. He'd continued to look proud clear to where Mad Dog exited the hall and could no longer see or be seen.

The front doors were just across the foyer. After that, it was only a matter of ducking around the outside of the building. Mad Dog got there in time to see Parker work her way along a hedge between the houses in back of the courthouse. Since she was doing so behind a raised pistol, Mad Dog decided not to come up behind her and provoke an unpleasant surprise. Instead, he trotted through a rose garden at the south end of the back yard of one of those houses, hopped a fence that let him out on Oak Street, and proceeded west toward the corner.

A row of catalpa trees lined the block ahead. Pale blossoms turned their thick foliage a ghostly shade of green and left the street in deep shadow. The north side of the street, past Monroe, was a green-gold wheat field, out of which a small figure ran, pell-mell, to where a motorcycle waited. The figure vaulted aboard, gunned the engine, then did a block-long wheelie, closely pursued. If the biker's torn pant leg was any indication, Hailey had crossed his path while he was up to no good.

Mad Dog whistled for her. She didn't come and it didn't surprise him. Even when she wasn't busy protecting him from bad guys, or evil squirrels and rabbits, she didn't obey commands and only occasionally met requests. She was his friend and partner, not his pet.

Mad Dog couldn't imagine what was going on. Apparently, someone had been shot by an arrow on Catfish Creek this morning. It had happened at the same time he was jogging by and Deputy Parker, whose opinion was not to be taken as lightly as Deputy Wynn's, thought Mad Dog might have been the intended target. The manifest absurdity of that had to be weighed against the evidence of the two arrows he'd seen protruding from the back door to the courthouse. A motorcyclist had been present on both occasions. There didn't seem much doubt the arrows at the courthouse had been meant for him, especially if Hailey was in full pursuit of the archer. The figure that had hopped on the Japanese crotch rocket had something slung over his shoulder. It could have been a bow.

Hailey wouldn't catch the motorcycle. Not unless she realized it had to turn south where Oak ended two blocks down at Van Buren. If she cut across a few yards, leapt a fence or two, and if the biker had to slow for traffic on Main, she just might catch him at the intersection. If she did, Mad Dog's money was on Hailey. But, he didn't want her hurt. In Buffalo Springs, there was always the chance of a farmer happening along with guns in the rack in his pickup's back window. None of them was apt to stop and ask whether Mad Dog's wolf-hybrid had good reason to be attacking a motorcycle rider. Most figured it was only a matter of time till she began killing their livestock or raiding their hen houses anyway.