Junkyard Dogs

7

When I got back to the office, Vic was stretched out on the reception bench asleep, wrapped in a couple of blankets with a pillow stuffed against the armrest. Dog lay beside the bench and wagged a greeting in four/four time as I sat with care next to Vic’s stocking feet—the only part of her that showed from under the gray wool.

I reached down and petted Dog, who fell over on his side next to Vic’s tactical boots and closed his eyes. It seemed like a really good idea, so I pulled my hat down over my face and leaned back against the wall.

Vic moved her feet up onto my lap, and her voice was thick with sleep. “Well, now we know why Duane told Geo that there were snakes in the tunnel.”

“Yep.” I rubbed the thick knitted socks and listened to her purr. “I locked up the cash crop, and Gina has taken command of the household. She says she didn’t know anything about Duane’s cottage industry.”

“Is she the one who works over at the Kum and Go, drives around with people tied to her bumper, and always smells like the chronic?”

“That’d be the one.”

“And you believe her?”

“Let’s just say I thought we had enough people in jail for one night, and I’ve got plenty more problems to go around. Where’s Henry?”

She pulled the blanket down, and her nose and the tarnished gold eyes appeared. “Asleep in your office.”

I exhaled and wasn’t sure if I had the energy to fill my lungs back up again. “How is the mad golfer?”

“Resting comfortably in holding cell A.”

“And the pot grower of America?”

“Holding cell B.” She adjusted, and I could see she was reaching underneath herself. “You want some more fucked-up shit?”

“Not really.”

She recovered some loose sheets of paper that she handed to me. “Too bad, ’cause it’s the only news that’s fit to print.”

I examined the pages. “What’s this?”

“The answer from NCIC on Sancho’s request for a report on the partial thumb, which came back as a negative—not enough print to work with.”

“It’s Felix Polk’s. We know that because he’s been everywhere in the county asking for it back.” I rubbed my face with one hand. “That’s another little chore I’ve got to go do.”

She wrapped the blanket tighter around the trunk of her body, emphasizing some of her more curvaceous physical attributes. “Uh-huh . . .”

I looked at her. “Now, why do I not like the sound of that?”

“Because I was bored and punched in Felix Polk and discovered he has a bench warrant with the Travis County Sheriff’s Department in Texas concerning a failure to appear on a breaking and entering charge stemming from an incident in 1963.”

“Is that all?”

She snorted. “Isn’t that enough?”

“I don’t think a more-than-forty-year-old bench warrant is going to be enough to occupy the Euskadi Avenger, especially now that we’ve got a real death on our hands.”

She laughed outright. “Yeah, well, imagine how Felix Polk is going to feel about having his past and minor transgressions revisited. And as to Geo Stewart’s death, there’s not much of a mystery to that one.”

“Maybe. Did you happen to notice that one of his shoe-laces was undone?”

The look she was giving me could’ve been defined as incredulous. “So?”

“Geo was pretty careful about that type of thing.”

She sat up. “Wait a minute, are we discussing the sartorial splendor of the man whose hair grew through his long underwear?”

“Yep, but he’s also the guy who wore both suspenders and a belt and fully laced his logging boots.”

She covered her head back up with the blanket. “Right.”

I sighed and thought about the long drive I was going to have to take up the mountain. “Is that address for Felix Polk current? I was thinking of paying him a little visit before Sancho gets to work. You want to tag along?”

She didn’t move, her head still covered. “No.”

I looked at Dog, who dropped his head back between his outstretched paws. So much for man’s best friends. I sighed and glanced down the hallway toward the two cells in back. “I don’t mean to disturb your rest, but you say Ozzie Junior is in cell A?”

“Sleeping like a lamb and snoring like a lion.”

“Well, it’s good that he’s getting some rest.”

She snuggled back down in her blankets, and I was starting to wish it were a wider bench. “Yeah, imagine how he’s going to feel when he wakes up and finds out he’s headed for the big house.”

“Are you Felix Polk?” The bandage on the man’s thumb, the registration of the Jeep Wagoneer in the drive, and the name on one of the mailboxes at the end of Caribou Creek Road were pretty good clues, but this was official business.

The wind raced over the canyon where we stood, and with the altitude I bet we were standing in negative ten degrees. Felix Polk was a tall man, almost as tall as I am and close to the same age, with a large belly but in good shape if you didn’t count the missing appendage. He had on a pair of chain-saw chaps and a hard hat with the built-in noise compressors flipped up so that he could hear me. Behind the cabin, some kind of machinery was running.

“You haven’t got my thumb with you, do you?”

I smiled at him. “Mr. Polk, that’s actually what I’d like to talk to you about.”

He nodded. “C’mon out back, and I’ll shut the log splitter down.”

I followed him around the cabin and noted the architecture. It was pretty indicative of the period when the Bighorn National Forest had had to concede a few spots of land to long-term, hundred-year leases. Some of them were coming up for renewal and were a cause of anxiety to the locals, and the ones that were built in the late forties and early fifties were recently changing hands for a reasonable amount of money because of the concerns over the state’s proclivity to cancel the leases.

This one was a handsome structure, the logs weathered to a solid gray with the old Oregon cement in between recently patched. Green asphalt shingles and wooden cased windows framed the small porch at the front, which led down a shallow slope to a pump house next to Caribou Creek.

There were stacks of firewood under every eave of the cabin, and a lean-to behind it held another eight cords at least. Evidently Felix Polk was expecting the winter to last as long as I was.

As nice as the cabin was, it was the environs that were the strong point. The house was nestled into a small box canyon with massive rock walls thrusting above the lodgepole pines. The majority of the privately owned structures in the mountains were situated in clusters along service roads or by the reservoirs such as Dull Knife, but this one was isolated with the only way in or out a dirt road that ran a winding three-quarters of a mile back to Route 16. It was just the kind of place to which you hoped to someday retire, and Felix Polk had.

“Twenty-two years at Dynamic Tool and Die; company went belly-up, but I had enough scraped together to buy this place. A truck driver who delivered a bunch of salvage equipment to us down in Austin told me about it.”

He set a cup of coffee in front of me, and I wondered if I dozed off and my nose landed in the mug, if I’d drown. There was a fire burning in the old brick fireplace, and the cabin was cozy and warm. The furnishings looked to be from the sixties, and there were built-in bookcases chocked with a lot of military history and mass-market paperbacks with titles like Death Hunt, Dead Zero, Dead On, and Death Blow; all in all, there was a lot of death on those shelves. The most disconcerting thing was the Nazi flag that hung over the fireplace. Felix Polk caught me looking at it. “My father’s; Belgium, 1944.”

“The Bulge?”

“Yeah. I think he hated the British almost as bad as the Germans. He used to love pointing out that nineteen thousand Americans died in that battle and the Brits only lost two hundred.”

“More to the point, how many did the Germans lose?”

“ ’Bout a hundred thousand casualties.”

I was tired but felt as if I should make a few stabs at small talk; besides, the other stab, the bite wound, was keeping me awake. “How long have you had the cabin?”

“About seven months now.” He poured himself a cup and sat across the kitchen table from me with a Dynamic Tool & Die mug. “It was in pretty bad shape, but I was able to work on it all through the summer. I already burned a lot of firewood living up here, so I got that industrial splitter.”

I gestured toward his bandage. “That how you lost the end of your thumb?”

He laughed and nodded. “Hell, yes—pinched it right off. I got my glove caught in the damn thing and didn’t even know I’d done it; felt a little funny so I pulled my glove off and damned if the end of my thumb didn’t stay in it.”

“Ow.”

“Yeah, it got pretty bad. When I went into the hospital over in Sheridan, they stitched it up and give me some pills. I made the mistake of takin’ a few of them with a couple of beers and couldn’t get off the sofa in there.”

“Why the hospital in Sheridan? The one in Durant is closer.”

“Needed gas for the splitter, and it’s cheaper over in Sheridan.”

“Did they notice that part of it was missing?”

“Yeah, they asked me about that, and it was then that I remembered that I’d made a run to the dump. I was drinkin’ beer while I was splitting and had that cooler out there, so when I fished the end of my thumb out of my glove I just put it in and forgot about it.”

I glanced around at the general unkempt quality of the cabin and asked, “You have a family, Mr. Polk?”

He nodded. “Used to. Had a wife that died, and I got a daughter, but then she died and I don’t hardly hear from the granddaughter anymore.” He studied me and looked at the ring finger on my left hand. “You a widower, Sheriff?”

“Yep.”

He sipped his coffee. “Kids?”

“Yep, a daughter.”

He nodded. “Seems like we’ve got a lot in common.”

I needed to get to the point of my visit. “Mr. Polk, are you aware that there’s a bench warrant for your arrest in Austin?”

He stiffened. “What?”

I leaned back in my chair. “This is not an official call, Mr. Polk, it’s just that one of my deputies ran your name through the database and came up with an outstanding charge of breaking and entering.”

He was surprised, to say the least, and then outraged. “From back in the sixties?”

“1963, actually.”

“Do you know what that’s about?”

In all honesty, I was tired and just didn’t care. “Mr. Polk . . .”

He stood with his back to me and then turned to lean against the refrigerator. “I stole my own truck.” He picked up his coffee cup and poured himself some more as a little of the outrage left him. He motioned toward me with the pot, but I declined. “I had this International Scout that dropped an automatic transmission and this fella fixed it, but charged me double. I promised him I’d pay him, but he kept my truck and wouldn’t give it back. Well, I had a job to go to so I broke into the mechanic shop and stole my truck; got picked up by a deputy three days later, spent a week and a half in stir.”

“Did you ever pay the bill?”

He puffed up a bit and wouldn’t make eye contact with me. “No, I figured that with the ten days I spent in jail we were even.” He shook his head in disbelief and stared at the green swirl linoleum on the kitchen floor. “Over forty years ago, and you show up on my doorstep.”

“I’m not here to arrest you, Mr. Polk.”

His eyebrows crouched over his eyes. “What?”

“As a matter of fact, I’m here to ask a favor concerning your thumb.”

With the holding cells filled to capacity, I was forced to take a nap in my office, which never works because everybody can find me.

“Ruby says to remind you that you have an eye doctor appointment tomorrow morning.”

I tipped my hat up and looked at Vic holding a fistful of the Post-its that my dispatcher usually left on my doorjamb. “I’m sleeping.” I lowered my hat.

“She also says Isaac Bloomfield says Bill McDermott discovered something and wants to talk to you about it.”

I raised my hat again. “Discovered something where?”

She sipped her energy drink, and I thought about asking her for some—I could use a little energy. “Something about Geo Stewart. I called Bloomfield but he wouldn’t tell me.” She sorted through the square yellow pieces of paper that represented my personal agenda. “I get the feeling he doesn’t like me.”

“He likes you fine, he just doesn’t like your language.”

“Fuck him.”

“Uh-huh.” Figuring my nap was over, I put my hat on my desk and pulled my sheepskin jacket down from where I was using it as a blanket. “Anything else?”

“You were snoring.”

“Sorry, it must be my wounds.” I glanced up at the old Seth Thomas clock on my wall—it was still losing about five minutes a year; I should be so lucky. It was past lunch, I still hadn’t had anything to eat—Dog had consumed both burritos—and I was famished. “I’m really hungry.”

She stood and flipped the Post-its onto my desk. “Well, let’s go and eat—as far as I know, Geo Stewart isn’t going anywhere.”

Even though the mercury had yet to break two degrees, we walked to the Busy Bee Café. “How did the meet with the nine-fingered man go?”

I pulled my gloves out and stuffed my fingers into them quickly, so as to keep all of my own. “He promised to not roam the county in search of his thumb.”

“In trade for?”

“His thumb.”

She shook her head. “Does he really want to make a key chain out of it?”

“He didn’t say.” A few of the assessor’s office ladies shot out of the back door of the courthouse, and we waited as they passed. “I also figured I’d call up the Travis County Sheriff’s Department and see if I could get them to drop the charges. The story he told me sounds legit, and I don’t think they’re going to want to pursue.” We rounded the corner of the courthouse. “Where is the Basquo, anyway?”

“At the hospital again.”

“I guess Antonio’s got colic.”

“Yeah, well at least the Critter’s got a house to live in.”

She seemed distant, and I figured I had to do a little bridge mending. “Do you want me to go look at that house with you today?”

She walked along the sidewalk that crossed the courthouse’s south lawn with her hands stuffed into her coat pockets and her ball cap on her head; she’d obviously seen me admiring the fur hat. “No.”

“I’ll really do it this time.”

“Someone put a higher bid in on it.”

I stopped, but she kept walking. “Oh.”

She turned at the top of the stairs that led down to the commercial portion of Main Street, all two blocks of it, and looked at me. “My life.”

I joined her at the precipice. “Yep?”

“Sucks.”

I stood close with my back blocking the wind and looked down at her. “How so?”

“I’m stuck in this one-horse town with this crappy job that doesn’t pay shit and an on-again/off-again relationship with my boss.”

I nodded. “Gee, you’re right, your life does suck.”

She hit me with an elbow. “It needed wiring, plumbing, and the foundation was going to have to be shored up, and some asshole paid more than the asking price.”

“We’ll find you another one.”

“I wanted that one.”

“I’m sorry.”

She kept her head down, and I leaned in till the brim of her hat was against my chest. She took a while to respond, and the clouds of her breath billowed up past my face like a rapidly cooling steam bath. “Yeah.”

We stood there like that for a while. “Pretty big step, buying a house.”

I felt the bill of her hat nod. “I figure I’m of an age where I need to start making some decisions in my life.”

“Am I one of those decisions?”

“Could be.”

She was right; ours was an on-again/off-again relationship, where the off-again part was mostly my fault. We’d had a smoldering attraction that had bloomed into a stoked furnace ever since an incident in Philadelphia had presented itself, but I still couldn’t reconcile the difference in our ages, that we worked together, and that only a few months ago her younger brother back in Philadelphia had proposed to my daughter.

“Look, I know that right now our ages don’t make that much of a difference, but ten years from now . . .”

“Fuck ten years from now.”

She looked up at me with those tarnished eyes, and I tried to think about what else I wanted to say. We continued to stare at each other and, as usual, I opted for the path of least resistance. “C’mon, it’s cold, I’ll buy you lunch.”

“I want a house.” She turned, and I followed her down the steps. “Hey, I know, maybe I could buy Sancho’s house.”

Henry was back at the office when we returned, and I made him accompany me to the hospital. Durant Memorial had a morgue, or a standard treatment room that served as a morgue—it was room 31, a piece of information that wasn’t shared with the common populace.

“Wouldn’t you say this was like finding a hole in a pincushion?”

“He was injecting himself three to four times a day to control his glucose levels, but there are two things abnormal about these three injection points. The location where most of his injections took place is in the normal areas of the body, the front and the outside of the thighs, the abdomen, except the area around the navel, the upper and outer areas of the arms, the area just above the waist on the back and the buttocks. You’ll notice where these injections were made.”

Bill McDermott held the junkman’s leg up for my inspection; I could see that there were three larger holes, which punctured the area behind the knee. “How in the world did you find them?”

“Blood.”

“What’s number two?”

“The size of the needle that went in there three times is a lot larger than the one regularly used for insulin, hence the blood.” I studied the young medical examiner on loan from the state of Montana. It’s something our neighbors from the north did as a courtesy in the depths of the Wyoming winter when the hour-and-forty-five-minute trip from Billings compared favorably with the five and a half hours from Cheyenne. Bill McDermott had changed since the last time I’d seen him. He looked worldlier and more affluent, which is what three months in Europe with Lana Baroja could do for you.

“When are you going to make an honest woman out of Lana?”

“She doesn’t want to be an honest woman.” He took a sip of his ginger ale and glanced at Henry, who stood quietly against the wall with his arms folded. Bill turned back and smiled at me, his long, blondish hair hanging in front of his face. “I heard your daughter is getting married.”

“I heard that, too.” I gestured back toward Geo Stewart’s body. “Was that the leg that had the untied boot?”

Both Isaac and the Montana ME nodded.

“Why inject him behind the knee, if indeed someone did?”

Isaac placed his hands in the pockets of his lab coat. “Closest point to the major artery in the leg, and it’s possible that it would go unnoticed.”

“So you’re saying somebody murdered him.”

McDermott was cautious. “We’re saying it’s possible that somebody murdered him.”

“With what?”

“Air.”

I walked over and leaned against the wall beside Henry. “I thought that only worked in made-for-TV movies.”

Isaac decided to take up some of the slack for Bill. “Depends on the condition of the victim, body position, and most important, the amount of air introduced into the system. It’s been reported in some medical journals that as little as twenty milliliters could do the trick, but that’s still quite a bit of air.”

The Cheyenne Nation’s voice rumbled beside me. “You would need a bicycle pump.”

“That, or a veternary syringe with something along the size of equine dosage.” Isaac looked down at the dead man. “Despite the uncertainties, air embolism has served as a reasonably dependable method of execution for quite a while. In my home country I was confined first for being a Jew and then for refusing to assist in the gassing of mental patients. Psychiatric institutions were ordered to continue so-called mercy killings by less conspicuous means. I was told there was a program described as ‘wild euthanasia,’ which began at the Meseritz-Obrawalde hospital in 1942. While most of the murders were carried out with overdoses of sedatives, some patients were injected with air, which usually killed them within minutes.”

“Would you need any medical knowledge to do this?”

The Doc glanced up at me. “Helpful, but not necessary.”