Junkyard Dogs

2

“We could put it in the lost and found.” I stared at him as he scratched his substantial beard. “Are you sure it’s a finger, Geo? ’Cause if we drive all the way out there, and it’s the end of a leftover bratwurst . . .”

“Not ’less they started puttin’ fingernails on hot dogs.”

I looked around the room. Neither Saizarbitoria nor Doc Bloomfield was offering much help. I sighed and chewed on the inside of my lip. “I don’t suppose there’s an engraved ring with the owner’s name inside on that finger, is there?”

He thought about it. “Nope, just the finger.”

“That was a joke, Geo.”

“Oh.”

I studied the old man and decided that his hat might’ve been a red and white floral pattern when it started out, but the accumulated grease gave it a rich patina that approached black. Curls of dirty silver escaped from underneath the cap and reached down past his predominant Adam’s apple. His skin was roasted a burnt coffee from the acid of long, hard labor and more than a few lines were etched around the welled sockets of his mouth and his Caribbean blue eyes.

Whenever I saw his eyes up close, I wondered what he would look like if he ever washed or shaved. Chances were, the collective county would never know.

“Can he travel, Doc?”

The attending physician nodded and crossed his arms over his ever-present clipboard. “I suppose so. His family members are still in the waiting room.”

I took a deep breath and leaned in as close to Geo as the fumes would allow. “Promise me, this time, you’ll ride inside the car?”

I pulled my ten-year-old Ray-Bans from my breast pocket and steered them onto my face to give my dilated pupils a little relief. Even though the skies were gloomy, damp, and gray like a dead body, there was enough of a glare to affect my sight. It was that part of the winter that stretched out like a Russian novel—a really, really long one.

I carefully picked my way across the frozen moguls of the Durant Memorial Hospital parking lot with Santiago Saizarbitoria trailing along behind me.

I wanted a little time with the Basquo alone.

It wasn’t very far to the reserved emergency vehicle spot, but I was glad I’d remembered to put my galoshes back on. I started to open the driver’s side of my truck but then remembered that my eyes were still dilated. I stepped back to look at Sancho. “Sorry, I forgot.”

I walked around the front of my unit to the unfamiliar passenger side of the Bullet. When I opened the door, there was a surprise—Dog was seated in the front. He turned to look at me as if I’d lost my mind. He had Saint Bernard in him and some German shepherd with a bunch of other things, most of them domesticated except for when you had bacon—then he was part great white shark.

“Where the hell did you come from?” We stared at each other or him at me and me in his blurry, general direction. “Back.”

He looked forlorn for a moment and then hopped his hundred-and-forty-five-pound frame onto the jump seat in the rear of the cab. I climbed in and turned to sort of look back at him. “Sorry, official business.”

Saizarbitoria climbed in the driver’s side, closed the door, strapped himself in, and turned to look at me. “You got the keys?”

“Yep.” I snagged the set from my jacket pocket and handed them to him. He fired up the three-quarter-ton, and I pointed a finger south. “To the dump, James.”

As he negotiated the parking lot, I fumbled with the mic on the dash and keyed the button in order to raise Ruby. “Base, this is unit one, over?”

Static. “How was your examination?”

“I’m going to get you for that. So, did Dog make his way to my truck or did you send him over with someone?”

Static. “The Ferg dropped him off on his way home. I’ve got a Methodist women’s meeting tonight, and you’re not trustworthy.”

Ruby did a lot of dog-sitting for me, and it was true that I abused the privilege every once in a while.

The airwaves went dead without further comment or levity.

I glanced at the young deputy in my driver’s seat and thought about what Vic had said. He looked good, considering what he’d gone through in the last few months, what with complications stemming from having a serrated kitchen knife filleting one of his kidneys in July and the birth of his first child, Antonio, in November. I’d been easing him back into full-time duty, but it did seem that his energy level was low. “So, you wanna take this show on the road?”

The Basquo smiled weakly as he rolled the steering wheel and pulled out. “Yeah.”

I looked out into the frozen landscape and thought about my daughter; I thought about how she hadn’t called lately, which is what I usually thought when I thought about Cady. I blamed it on the young man she was going to marry this summer, figured they had a lot to talk about. Michael Moretti was occupying Cady’s time, and I was jealous.

The radio broke up my infantile reverie.

Static. “Vic just got here. Are you taking Dog to the dump?”

I keyed the mic and reached around to pat his massive head. “Sure, with twenty-three square inches of olfactory membrane, it’ll be like Disneyland for him.”

Static. “Don’t forget about the Stewarts’ dogs.”

Geo had a pair of mutt wolf-dogs, Butch and Sundance, that were famous countywide as being two of the fiercest creatures this side of Cerberus. They had killed a cougar, a few coyotes, and run at least a couple of black bears off their turf—not to mention more than a few adventurous teenagers. I looked back at the now-expectant canine eyes. Mine were still swimming a slight backstroke as I keyed the mic again. “I’ll keep him close.”

Static. “He gets filthy, you get to wash him.”

“Deal.” Dog looked at me and smiled a fanged smile while I scratched under his wide chin.

I turned back and studied Saizarbitoria as he carefully drove my truck out of town, and I tried desperately to see a little bit of the wayward spark in the musketeer’s eye.

Sancho steered through the foothills outside Durant—the darkening skies were absorbing what little heat there had been and giving none. It was Monday of the second week in February and people talked less because their words were snatched from their mouths and cast to Nebraska. I had an image of all the unfinished statements and conversations from Wyoming piled along the sand hills until the snow muffled them and they sank into the dark earth. Maybe they rose again in the spring like prairie flowers, but I doubted it.

As we made the turn where Geo Stewart had slid into the barrow ditch, an orange ’78 Ford pickup waved us down. A mustached cowboy lowered his window as Santiago switched on the emergency lights and slowed to a gentle, sliding stop on the rinklike ice.

The Basquo pushed the button on his window, and I shouted across him. “Hey, Mike.”

The sculptor shook his head and smiled. “Did you get old man Stewart untied from that Oldsmobile?”

“Yep, we did.”

“I wasn’t sure if somebody had cut him loose or if he’d just worn off.” He draped a hand over his steering wheel and checked to make sure no one was behind him. “I dropped a load of junk off at the dump, but there wasn’t anybody at the scales, so I figured you’d taken the old man to the hospital.” He drew his hand across his face and chuckled. “Ozzie Dobbs was up there unloading a bunch of stuff, and I don’t mind tellin’ you he was just as happy to not see Geo there.”

I looked through the windshield and thought about the new housing development that had planted itself on the rise that led to the foothills just west of the dump and Geo’s junkyard. They didn’t call it a housing development, but that’s what it was, if you could call five-acre ranchettes with four-million-dollar mansions alongside a golf course a housing development.

Redhills Rancho Arroyo had been the brainchild of Ozzie Dobbs Sr., a developer from the southern part of the state, who had taken the opportunity to buy the cheap land adjacent to the dump that happened to have views of the eastern slope of the Bighorns. Ozzie Sr. had quietly passed about two and a half years ago, and the reins had gone to his son, Ozzie Jr., who had been making a public case for having the junkyard/ dump moved again. Geo Stewart was having none of it.

Mike Thomas’s tidy, picturesque ranch was over a couple of ridges from my cabin, and whenever Martha and I had driven by Mike’s place, my late wife had looked at it wistfully. He’d sculpted it as meticulously as he did his statuary, with hand-hewn logs, crafted doors, and an artist’s eye. It made me want to hate his guts, but he was too nice a guy. Geographic proximity made him an interested party in what was, southeast of town, the makings of a modern range war.

All this history clattered through my mental projector and slapped the tail end with the sculptor’s voice. “Walt, those people are a hazard.”

I tried to rethread the film. “Yep, but thank goodness it’s mostly to themselves.” I smiled back at him to let him know that my preoccupation wasn’t personal. “Hey, Mike, can you show me your hands?”

He looked puzzled but held up a full complement of digits.

We continued on our way, and I remarked to Sancho with my most determined investigative face. “We call that detecting.”

He didn’t laugh like he used to.

We drove into the driveway of the Stewart family’s big house, careful to avoid the mailbox lying in the roadway, and took the cutoff leading to the junkyard’s double gates, which were across from the dump’s drive-on scales.

The combination junkyard/dump was in an old gravel quarry, and the cliffs at the back of the place rose to almost a hundred feet. Even though you could see row after row of antiquated vehicles to the left and mound after mound of trash to the right, it wasn’t a bad spot.

Geo’s incongruous-looking office, an art-deco structure that had been salvaged from the city pool and still a startling, if peeling, turquoise with white circular windows and rounded trim, was straight ahead. If you looked hard enough, you could still see the darker paint where the letters that spelled SNACK BAR had fallen off.

The Classic was parked by the scales along with a phalanx of tow trucks, all from different decades, but no one seemed to be around.

“Pull over here and park it.”

He did as I requested without comment. It was possible he was dreading the rest of the long winter even more than I was and that his words were also gone to Nebraska with the wind.

I took a sounding. “How’s Marie?”

It took a moment, but the words slowly surfaced. “More tired than she was when she was pregnant.”

“I bet.” I had thought about telling him a few months ago how tiring it would be when the little rascal was out and about but had decided to keep that nugget of wisdom to myself. “How’s Antonio?”

He continued to look at the zigzag patterns of snow, his face away from me. “He sleeps . . . sometimes.”

“It can get a little wearing.”

I watched his breath on the window. “What?”

“Babies, they can get a little wearing.”

He still didn’t move. “Yeah.”

“Have you figured out whose he is?”

He sat there until he turned his head far enough forward so that one eye drifted my way. “What?”

I leaned against my door, readjusted my old .45 so that it wasn’t poking me, and looked at the Basquo. “All right, what’s on your mind, Sancho.”

He contemplated the Remington twelve-gauge locked onto the transmission hump, and we sat there listening to the dry rhythm of the wind gusts as they pushed against the outside of the truck. His voice sounded like it was coming out of a barrel. “I’m thinking about going back to corrections.”

Santiago had started his law enforcement career in Rawlins at the state prison’s maximum security wing. I’d had him for less than a year but liked him and wanted to keep him. “Why?”

It took him a moment to respond. “I think I’m better suited working in an environment where I know everybody’s guilty.”

I smiled. “At least judged to be guilty by a jury of their peers.”

“Well then, in an environment where I can treat everybody as if they’re guilty.” I didn’t say anything. “Look, I know you’re going to try and talk me out of doing this . . .”

“No, I’m not.”

“You’re not?”

“Nope.” I tipped my hat back and looked at him. “You decide to go, I’ll give you a recommendation that’ll turn the state attorney general’s head, but the only thing I ask is that you give it a few weeks and not make your move too quickly. It seems to me you’ve got an awful lot on your plate right now and—”

“I’m giving you my two-weeks’ notice as of today.” He turned back to the glass.

So much for the wise ol’ sheriff routine.

I closed my mouth, took a breath, and continued to inspect him for remnants of the man I’d hired fourteen months ago. It was a tough business coming to terms with your own mortality, and some people, once they are confronted with its face, never forget its features. “Okay.”

We returned to the silence, and then he spoke again. “I’ve talked it over with Marie.”

I thought about Martha and how she’d never adjusted to the life. “Okay.” The word was like a bad taste.

“You still want me for the two weeks?”

I thought about all those years, all those times I’d thought about quitting. “You bet.”

I cracked open my door, and even in the cold, the smell was like a wall.

I had noticed that Duane had approached the driver’s side of the truck, but Sancho hadn’t. When Duane tapped on the driver’s side window, Santiago started, which made Duane jump back in turn, whereupon he lost his balance and fell onto the frozen ground, which was pooled with a slick of motor oil and frozen rusty water.

Sancho turned and looked at me. “Jesus.”

I opened the door the rest of the way, and Dog jumped out. I gave Duane a hand up. There were tattoos on his knuckles and under his thermal hood was a T-shirt with the inscription, MESS WITH ME, AND YOU MESS WITH THE WHOLE TRAILER PARK. The humor didn’t seem to match the young man’s sensibilities, so someone must’ve bought it for him or maybe I was underestimating Duane.

“You guys here about the hand?”

I nodded. “We heard it was just a finger.”

He looked nervous, but then he always looked nervous when we were around. He still smelled vaguely like marijuana. “Yunh-huh, yeah, a finger.”

I heard a low growl and looked at Dog, who was sitting on my foot. He was transfixed and looking directly at the junkyard’s quasi-office where, in one of the claw-scarred, Plexiglas windows, Butch and Sundance were seated at attention with only their heads showing. They were as big as Dog but not as bulky. He growled again, low enough to quake my own lungs, and I swatted at him.

“Stop it.” He easily evaded my hand and looked at me, hurt at my admonishment. I threw a chin toward the two Heinz fifty-seven variety wolves. “They’re behaving, so you better be good or I’ll put you back in the truck.”

I glanced at the two sets of eyes that studied us, aware that even if they were behaving, it didn’t mean they weren’t planning. There was something about the way they sat there quietly that reminded me of what my friend Henry Standing Bear says about the quiet ones being like the Cheyenne, waiting until you were in a compromised position, then moving to action. For now, they were behind closed doors, and I was just as glad.

“Are you watching the office for your grandfather?”

“Yunh-huh.”

“Where’s he?”

He gestured with a thick hand. “That way.”

I nodded and started off. “Make sure to keep Butch and Sundance in the office, okay?”

“Okay.”

Piles of garbage were heaped to the surrounding hillsides on our right and as Double Tough, another of my deputies, would have said, the unfettered smells were bad enough to gag a maggot off a gut wagon. All in all, it looked pretty much how I was beginning to feel.

The Basquo caught up but kept a hand over his mouth and nose. “How about I stay in the truck?”

I shook my head. “Nunh-unh.” I waited for a response, but there wasn’t any. “If this is your last two weeks, then you’re going to be the primary on this one.”

He sighed, and his shoulders shrugged a little as he stuffed the small evidence kit under his arm. “It’s freezing. How come we don’t just drive the rest of the way in?”

“Because I’ve already lost two tires to scrap metal and wayward drywall screws in this place, and I’m not about to lose another.”

I flipped the collar up on my coat and stuffed my gloved hands even deeper into my pockets. The high plains was a place of extremes with a people of extremes—most of my work involved the sentient and venal aspects of human nature—but even with the wet and the real, we generally didn’t get body parts.

As we walked toward the hill, there was a cracking sound from the road that led to the dump’s interior. Saizarbitoria looked in the direction of the noise and then back to me. “Are those shots?” There was more than a little concern in his voice.

“Yep. A .22, I’d say.”

He picked up his pace, and I followed along like a one-man posse. I’d gone about three steps when I remembered Dog—he was still watching Butch and Sundance. “Hey.”

He looked at me, back to them, and then followed.

I nudged him with my leg. “What’re you, a tough guy?”

When we got over the hill, it was as I’d expected. Geo Stewart, Durant Memorial Hospital patient-at-large, was dispatching rats with a Savage automatic varmint rifle at an alarming rate. At least, I assumed it was rats. He turned to prop the stock on his knee so that he could remove the tiny magazine, gave us a brief nod of his head to indicate that he was aware of our presence, and then scooped a handful of rounds from his stained and tattered Carhartt. “Hey, Sheriff, long time no see.”

Evidently the shoulder wasn’t bothering him. “Hey, Geo.”

He studied my face as we got closer. “Somethin’ wrong with your eyes?”

I pushed my sunglasses farther up onto my nose, effectively covering the twin saucers of my pupils. “What are you shooting, Geo?”

He went back to thumbing .22 longs into the spring clip of the rifle’s magazine. “Damnable rats, found one of ’em in the cooler trying to run off with the finger I told you about.” His chest-length beard was zipped into his coat. “Adjuster came up here a few months ago and said that if I didn’t do something they’d cancel the insurance. Gaddam insurance.”

Sancho pulled the collar of his jacket up as a makeshift filter since the wind had shifted and we were now getting the full, odiferous impact of the surroundings. “Jesus.” The Euskadi eyes leveled with the junkman’s. “How do you get used to the smell?”

Geo eyed him without irony and then moved off with the words “What smell?”

It was a two-gallon Styrofoam cooler—one of the cheap ones that you can pick up at any service station in the summer season and then listen to it squeak to the point of homicidal dementia. It was sitting on the top of a toppled old avocado-colored refrigerator from the seventies. The cooler must’ve been relatively new, however, because it had a bar code sticker on the side.

I didn’t take my hands out of my pockets. “So, is the fickle finger of fate in this?”

Geo nodded, and he, Dog, and I looked at the Basquo. “Okay, fine.” Saizarbitoria stepped up and plucked the top from the cooler, the vacuum pressure causing it to shiver as he lifted. He stood there for a moment, craning his neck for another perspective, and then closed it. “It’s not a finger.”

I could tell the effects of the drops were beginning to fade as I looked at Geo, who was starting to protest.

Santiago raised a hand. “It’s part of a thumb.”

I stepped in, and the Basquo obliged me by lifting the lid again.

The thumb was lodged in a thin skim of ice along with a little dirt and a couple of crushed Olympia beer cans. I made a show of pulling my hands from my pockets, then holding them up like a fighter pilot for review. “Not mine.”

Geo went as far as to present his two thumbs, and we both turned toward Saizarbitoria, who refused to play the game.

It was fresh, and of prodigious size, almost as large as my own. Mottled with a whitish cast, the separated end was crushed and gave no impression of having been surgically removed—it was going to be hard to get a print. “Male.”

Santiago nodded. “Yeah.”

“What do you figure?”

The Basquo took a deep breath and immediately regretted it. “A day, maybe two, but as cold as it’s been it could be longer.”

I nodded. “Maybe it just froze off somebody.”

He pulled an evidence bag from his kit along with a pair of plastic gloves, which he stretched with a bellows of air from his lungs. He stuffed his leather gloves in his jacket pocket and then snapped the latex ones over his hands. He set the cooler top to the side and reached in to gingerly take the digit from the filthy ice; then he placed it in the evidence bag, zipped it shut, replaced the cooler top, and wedged the entirety under his arm.

“I’ll check the bar code with local merchants, interview the medicos to see if anybody had a thumb removed or was treated for any like injury. I’ll also check the NCIC fingerprint bank, but it’s mangled so you’re going to be lucky if you get even a partial hit.”

I nodded. “You gonna set a grid and check the scene?”

He looked at the darkening sky. “You’ve got to be kidding.”

“You never know.”

Sancho turned to Geo with a resigned dip of his head and spread his hands. Geo blinked like a whitetail deer and cupped the rifle in a two-palmed hammock like an Indian would have.

There was an Indian air about Geo, or maybe it was a mountain man quality. Some people live on the high plains because they can’t live anywhere else, their antennae fixed to a frequency that is preset to offense. Once in a long while they venture into town and drink and argue too much. Like fine instruments of delicate temperament rarely played, they become untuned and discordant. I had arrested Geo only once in my career, for drunk and disorderly, when his grandson had gotten married six months ago.

They disappeared over the next hill, and I walked back toward the truck with Dog. I could hear the sound of a diesel motor coming from the front gate and echoing off the hills like a skipping stone as I hiked back toward the main entrance. A top-of-the-line, deep green Chevrolet that proclaimed REDHILLS RANCHO ARROYO on the doors was pulling a gleaming dump trailer pinstriped the same color up to the gate. I looked around for Duane, then walked over.

Ozzie Dobbs Jr. was undersized and overly cheery, smiling with small, square teeth that looked like Italian tile. He was wearing a large cattleman’s style hat, and a green-checkered cowboy scarf was tied at his throat with a square knot and not the usual buckaroo one the cowboys in these parts preferred. The window whirred, and I noticed he let it down enough to be heard but not enough to let the cold or stink in. “Uh-oh. What’s the problem, Officer?”

I patted my leg again for Dog to follow and carefully picked my way to the side of the shiny truck. “Oh, an unidentified individual may have dropped down on the evolutionary scale.” I leaned on the window, tipped my hat back, and smiled at Ozzie’s mother, who was in the passenger seat. “Hello, Mrs. Dobbs.”

Betty Dobbs was approaching eighty but was still a looker with a fine bone structure that had held up to the years and sad eyes, which made you want to tell her anything she wanted to hear. She had been my ninth-grade English/civics teacher, and at the time I’d considered her a harpy. Now retired, she was known to volunteer for every civic organization imaginable, from the county animal shelter to the friends of the library and the hospital auxiliary.

“Hello, Sheriff. It’s a lovely evening, isn’t it?”

Evidently, the smell and the cold hadn’t invaded the cab yet. “Yes, ma’am.” I looked around again for the younger Stewart, but only the dogs were in the office. “Got your water bill, Ozzie?”

He grudgingly pulled the yellow slip from the seat but held on to it. “Yeah, I’ve got the damned thing but I gotta tell you, Sheriff, I got about three more loads, and I was hoping you fellas would cut me some slack.”

I glanced back at his covered trailer. “Well, I understand you’ve already dumped one load today. What’ve you got back here?”

He stared at me for a second, probably wondering where I’d gotten my information. “Mostly brush I clear-cut from down by Wallows Creek.”

“All right.” I glanced back toward dump central, where I’d last seen Santiago and the solid waste facility engineer. “I’m not sure where Duane is or where Geo’s going to want you to put it, but you better back up and run it through the scale.”

He sighed. “I will, but then the commissar is gonna want to charge me. I don’t want to say anything against anybody, but you give some people a little power and it goes straight to their head.” He gave an apologetic glance to his mother and then started in again. “I have yet to come up here and not have that old bastard go through every load I bring into this place. You’d think I was trying to drop off nuclear waste.” I held up a hand, but it had little effect. “Now, he knows I’ve lobbied the county to shut this place down and move it a little farther out—and that’s a fight I’m going to win, but as to that private junkyard of his . . .”

“Ozzie.”

His face reddened, but he continued. “The amount of ground seepage, antifreeze, transmission fluid, gasoline, and oil that comes off this hill and down into Rancho Arroyo would be a disgrace to any government agency, and I can tell you that I’m not above making a few phone calls and turning this into a Superfund site.”

I spoke with a little more authority this time. “Ozzie.”

He stopped and glanced at his mother again, finally resting his eyes on his vehicle’s dash. Mrs. Dobbs moved a little past the profile of her son and looked at me imploringly. “I apologize, Sheriff. Ozzie Junior’s had a trying day, and I’m afraid his nerves are on end.”

I allowed a commensurate amount of silence to pass. “That’s fine, Mrs. Dobbs.” I studied the side of her son’s face, but I think he was embarrassed to look up. I stepped back, calling for Dog to accompany me. “I’ll say something to Geo, Ozzie.”

His mother, unwilling to leave things unsettled and impolite, leaned across and called out to me. “How is your daughter, Sheriff?”

I smiled and raised my voice to be heard over the diesel. “Cady’s fine, ma’am.”

“Still with the law firm in Philadelphia?”

“Yes, Mrs. Dobbs.”

“Betty, please. Are we going to see you at the Redhills Rancho Arroyo Survival Invitational this weekend?”

As a reputable and highly visible member of the community, I received an invitation to the goofy golf tournament every year, but since I wasn’t even a fair-weather golfer, I always ignored it. The Redhills Rancho Arroyo Survival Invitational was one of those midwinter golf tournaments where they played in parkas with optical orange golf balls, white not being a winter color for golf. “I’d love to attend, but I don’t golf, Betty.”

“Yes, but that lovely friend of yours does.” She smiled. “The Native American fellow?”

“Henry Standing Bear, he’s Cheyenne.” Even women in their eighties smiled at the thought of Henry; it was, as always, annoying. “He’s at my jail right now.”

Her forehead furrowed. “Oh, no.”

“Nothing professional; the pipes in both his house and where he works froze, so he needed a place to stay.”

“Doesn’t he golf?”

“Yes ma’am, he’s a scratch player.” I shrugged. “He’s good at everything.”

“He broke your nose, as I recall.”

“Eighth grade, at the water fountain.”

“Didn’t he go on to college?”

“Yes, ma’am—Berkeley.”

She nodded in remembrance. “I don’t suppose you could convince him to play? The benefits from this year’s tournament are going to the American Indian College Fund, and it would be wonderful if we could have a Native American participate.”

I waved, trying to indicate that the conversation was ending. “Well, when I get back to the office I’ll mention it to him.”

She continued to smile, but Ozzie pressed the button for the window. Mrs. Dobbs sat back as he put the truck in reverse, and I saw that Saizarbitoria and Geo were walking side-by-side down the inner road, the Basquo still holding the cooler under his arm, his hat now functioning as a makeshift mask.

About fifty yards away, Geo said something to my deputy, and they parted company—Sancho toward me, and the dump man, still holding the rifle, toward the scales.

I leaned against the grille guard on my truck and watched the young man approach with a slight hitch in his step and a general attitude of dissatisfaction. He reminded me of me.

He pulled up about two steps away and lodged the web of his thumb over the butt of the seventeen-shot Beretta at his hip. “All right, I set a preliminary grid with the twine, but I gotta tell you that in my learned opinion the thumb arrived in the cooler and we have nothing to gain by digging up the surrounding area.”

I crossed my arms and nodded. “You don’t think we’re going to find the rest of him out there, huh?”

“No, and Mr. Stewart says there hasn’t been anything disturbed in that area for a couple of weeks now and given the fragile nature of the container . . .” He squeezed the cooler till it squeaked. “I’d say it’s a new arrival.” He studied me. “Is digging up the entire dump in the freezing cold for the next two weeks going to be my punishment for leaving?”

I ignored him and asked another question. “You gonna check the permits for the weekend?”

“Yeah. The place is closed on Sundays, so it had to arrive either late Friday or Saturday.”

“Well, get the paperwork from Geo, and we’ll . . .”

I was interrupted by a series of shouts coming from the direction of the scales. I turned in time to see the scarecrow figure of Geo Stewart with the .22 rifle held at port arms standing on the scales in front of Ozzie Jr.’s truck. The developer gunned the engine on the vehicle to impress his intentions upon the dump man, even going so far as to lurch the one-ton forward so that the chrome grille guard was almost touching him. Butch and Sundance were leaping in the air in an attempt to gain enough purchase to burst through the office Plexiglas.

I held up a finger to the Basquo. “Just a second—I’ll be back in a minute.” I hustled across the broken ground, raised a hand, and shouted. “Hold on, hold on!”

I guess they couldn’t hear me—or maybe it was that they just didn’t want to—but Geo didn’t retreat, and I could see his mouth moving in response to what looked like Ozzie’s spitting tirade. I was about thirty yards away when the truck lurched again, and the junkman was thrown backward.

Geo hit the railroad-tie ramp with a liquid thump, and his head cracked against the hard surface of the creosote-soaked wood, the rifle falling to the side with the ch-kow sound that indicated it had gone off. At its discharge, the truck stopped but, as near as I could tell, it was still in gear.

“Put that thing in park!”

I scrambled forward—Dog was beside me now and was barking. I could see where the round had glanced off the windshield, cracking the glass and shearing a deep groove through the trim and the front of the cab.

I placed a hand on the elevated sill of the driver’s window, reached in through the narrow opening, turned off the motor, and snatched the keys from the ignition. “Are you two all right?”

Ozzie didn’t move, but his mother, pale and breathless, replied, “We’re fine, but what about George?”

I slipped from the door and moved to the front of the truck where Geo was stretching his neck to one side as he lay there on the ramp. He was feeling the back of his head. I kneeled down and supported him, and his hat fell back, exposing the waxy, pure white skin where the sun had never touched him. “Are you okay?”

He closed his eyes and then stretched them open, alternately flexing his jaw.

“Geo, are you all right?”

“Whoo-eeha.” He moved his mouth, with the fog from his breath condensing in the frigid air, and then drew a hand up to swipe the saliva from the corner of his mouth before it froze. “I didn’t shoot nobody, did I?”

I smiled down at him. “Just the truck, but I think it’ll make it.” We both chuckled. Dog was standing by the scales and barking at the wolf mutts that were now taking turns jumping against the window. I did a little barking of my own. “Enough!” He quieted down, and my eyes drifted past to Saizarbitoria, who stood with the cooler and evidence kit at his feet where he’d dropped them.

His sidearm was drawn and, even from this distance, I could see his hands shaking. I watched him until he became aware of me; he half-turned, lowering the Beretta.

Betty Dobbs was out of the truck and now crouched beside the shaken junkman, who looked up at her and smiled brilliantly from beneath the dirt and whiskers. “Are you all right? I didn’t shoot you, did I?”

She laughed and shook her head at him.

I cleared my throat and started to stand. “Betty, could you keep an eye on him for just a second?” She smoothed his hair back, and I figured George was in better hands. “I’ll be right back.”

As I stood, I became aware that Ozzie Dobbs Jr. had tried to open his truck door, but that the railing on the scale had him penned. “Did you see that? That crazy son of a bitch tried to shoot us!” He was still spitting, and his Chiclet teeth showed in a thin-lipped grimace.

Remembering Dobbs’s keys were still in my palm, I stuffed them into my pocket and held a hand out to silence him. “Stay where you are.”

He looked around, unable to see Betty or Geo at the front of the truck. “Where’s my mother?!”

“She’s taking care of the man you just tried to run over.”

I turned my back to him and approached my deputy, all the while attempting to get a handle on the surge of adrenaline that continued to bottle-rocket through my veins. The Basquo hadn’t moved and was still turned a quarter away from me with the pistol at the side of his leg, his upper lip trapped between his teeth.

“You all right?”

He didn’t say anything.

“Are you all right?”

He strained to speak. “Yeah.”

I looked back to make sure I was the only one who had witnessed him drawing his weapon. I turned to Sancho and gestured gently toward the semiautomatic. “You wanna holster that thing?”

“Yeah . . . yeah.”

As he secured the Beretta, I turned and saw the strangest thing I’d seen all day, and I’d seen a lot of strangeness up to this point. George Stewart and my ninth-grade English/civics teacher were entwined in a passionate kiss.