An Obvious Fact (19 page)

“Why?”

“The incredible normalcy of it.” She turned to look at me. “So, two ATF birds in one bush? Any guesses?”

“Not a one.”

“So, this is not an informant or someone but an actual secret agent?”

“I don't think they call them secret agents.”

“I know, but I like the sound of it—makes it sound espionage-y and shit.”

I let that one settle. “According to McGroder and this John Stainbrook character, there are two undercover operatives.”

“Undercover operatives—I like that, too.” She went back to watching a particular house down the street. “Well, be careful what you wish for; an hour ago you were wishing you could talk to these ATF guys about what Post was working on, and now you've got his boss hotfooting it up here.”

“It must be important.” I turned and looked at the Cheyenne Nation. “How's it going?”

“I do not know.” He put the top back on the plastic case and pushed a button, which resulted in a high-pitched squeal from the thing. “I think it is working.” He extended the wand with a disc on it toward the dash, and the thing started screaming again.

“Can you turn the volume down?”

Vic peered at the instrumentation on the Dodge. “Wow, who would've figured there was real metal in the dash.”

The Bear adjusted the knob and fiddled some more. “It is set on the highest level of sensitivity, but I will adjust it when we get on the lawn.”

Vic glanced at the sky. “Dark enough?”

I pulled the door handle and climbed out. “Unless we're going to hang around here all night.” I met the two of them at the back of the pumpkin chiffon muscle car, the perfect vehicle for undercover work. “It must be the Tudor-looking one
three houses up—the one next to the house with the cars parked on the lawn.”

Vic shook her head as Henry continued to calibrate the metal detector. “So, tell me again what the hell we're doing out here?”

I opened the trunk and pulled out the new shovel I'd purchased at Shipton's Ranch Supply. “When I was talking to Engelhardt, he said that one of the run-ins he had had with Billy ThE Kiddo was when he shot his neighbor's lawn mower with a .40 Glock. Post was shot with a .40, so I thought we'd get the slug and hand it over to DCI and see if they could get a match—case solved.”

She looked at the oversized lawns. “You're kidding.”

I closed the trunk and balanced the shovel on my shoulder. “Got a better idea?”

She studied the house next to the Tudor. “Yeah, we get a warrant, go into the jackass's house, find the gun, and hand it over to DCI for testing.”

“You think he's stupid enough to still have it?”

“I think he's stupid enough to open a wholesale stupid store and sell franchises.”

Following the Bear, I started off down the street. “Well, if this doesn't work—”

She sighed and brought up the rear.

Staying to the far side of Kiddo's house, Henry dropped the wand and started detecting, moving it across the newly mown grass, whereupon it squealed softly and the yellow light on the instrument panel lit up. “A little too sensitive.” He recalibrated it again, but this time the thing did nothing at all. “Hmm, a little too desensitized perhaps.”

While he fiddled with the adjustments, Vic and I looked around. There were no lights on in either of the two houses, and it looked as though there was no one home in either one.

She leaned against a large cottonwood and studied the Kiddo abode. “So, in a nice neighborhood, this asshole parks his cars and motorcycles in the yard.”

There was a noise behind us, and I turned to see Henry waving the metal detector over a small patch of God's little acre. I walked over. “Something?”

“Possibly.”

Looking around one last time, I placed the edge of the blade into the turf and dug in. I lifted a chunk of sod, tipped it to the side, and then stomped another shovel full from the ground, carefully placing it beside the hole for reinterment. “How far down does that thing read?”

He shrugged. “I have no idea.”

I shoveled again and this time felt something scrape. I handed the spade to Henry, took out my Maglite, shined it in the hole, and poked around, finally recovering an old railroad spike. “Hmm.”

“Not what we are looking for?”

“No.” I returned the dirt to the hole and then replaced the sod, stomping on it, as the Bear continued working the massive lawn. “This is going to take all night.” I glanced around for Vic, but she'd obviously gotten bored and wandered off.

The machine made another noise, and I followed Henry to a spot about twenty feet away and repeated the procedure, which resulted in another spike. “What'd we find, the transcontinental railroad here?”

He shrugged again and moved on, but after another five
railroad spikes, I was losing my enthusiasm. “I don't suppose you could dial that thing down again?”

“I could, but the difference between a railroad spike and a slug might be beyond this particular model's abilities.” He adjusted the thing again. “It would be helpful if we had an approximate area where the shooting took place.”

“Yep, I know.”

I looked up and could see Vic standing just a little ways away.

“How's it going?” She stepped closer and raised a glass to her lips, sipped some wine, and glanced around in the darkness. “Don't quit your day job.”

It took me a moment to ask. “I'm almost afraid to know, but where'd you get the wine?”

“Earl Heiple, who owns the yard we're digging in.”

“Did you go introduce yourself to Mr. Heiple?”

“I did. He was reading in his den, so I knocked on his back door.”

“And he gave you a glass of wine?”

“He's ready to give you one, too. He says he hates that riotous prick next door.” She paused. “He's like a hundred years old, but called Kiddo a riotous prick—used those exact words.” She took another sip. “I like him.”

“He didn't happen to tell you where Billy ThE shot the lawn mower, did he?”

She gestured with the wineglass. “Yeah, out there in the middle someplace; he said he'd show us.”

• • •

“They used railroad ties near the sidewalk. They backfilled the front lawn in '27, but I guess the spikes are still there.”

“Has your family always lived here?”

He nodded his gray head and pushed his glasses farther up on his nose. “Fourth generation South Dakota.”

He noticed Henry's glass was a little low and reached an unsteady hand out to pour the Bear a little more cabernet. “This is the 2012—it's very good.”

“Thank you.”

He gestured toward my glass, but I waved him off and he smiled. “I would've thought all that digging would've given you a thirst.”

I returned the smile. “So, you didn't know we were out there?”

“Not until this beautiful young lady appeared at my door.”

I picked up my glass and took a sip. “I'm thinking I should be apologizing.”

He set the bottle back on the counter. “No need.”

The house was massive and well furnished, the kitchen a wooden structure that had been added on to the backside of the stone house, a precaution that had been made in the days when such rooms periodically burnt down. His den looked to be an old porch that had been converted, and I couldn't help but wonder why he appeared to live the majority of his life in the more modest portions of the huge house.

I glanced around the kitchen—homey, but a little run down. “You live here alone?”

He nodded and sat on a stool opposite the three of us. “Ever since Evelyn died seventeen years ago.”

“Children?”

“A son in Florida and a daughter in Alabama; I think the Midwest winters took a toll on them.” He sighed and looked around. “It's a museum, I know. They keep trying to get me to move, but so far I've resisted. I've lived here my whole life, and I'm not sure I'd know myself anywhere else.”

The Cheyenne Nation warmed to the old man. “What did you do? For a living.”

He gestured toward the book lying on the counter to our left, Herodotus's
The Histories
. “I taught world history at Black Hills State.”

“‘Men trust their ears less than their eyes.'”

He nodded and looked sad. “He is rather one-sided, but he's still the most reliable historian of the ancient world.” The old scholar considered me. “I find it hard to believe that a Wyoming sheriff quotes Herodotus.”

“It's a magnificent book.”

He placed a wrinkled hand lovingly on the tome. “I read it periodically to convince myself that we live in more civilized times.”

“Where people shoot each other's lawn mowers?”

“‘From great wrongdoing there are great punishments from the gods.'” He glanced at me through the tops of his bifocals. “Are you here to punish wrongdoers?”

“Yep.”

He stood and moved toward the door, and we followed. “The Kiddos were marvelous people, but their son's actions have always been questionable, to say the least.”

We gathered our primitive equipment from the back stoop, and I watched as Vic surreptitiously slipped an arm through
one of his, carefully steering him along the sidewalk toward the front lawn.

The old fellow was spry enough and led us to a spot near the property line but thankfully with an obstructed view of Billy's house next door. “I was mowing the grass myself when he came out of his house shooting like a madman. I think the first shot landed somewhere out near the middle of the lawn, but the second I'm sure of since it missed my foot by only a yard or so.” He tapped a house shoe on a spot in the grass. “I would say here.”

The three of us stepped back, and Henry ran the wand over the patch; the device immediately squealed and lit up.

I stepped forward with the shovel and repeated the procedure. I was starting to feel like a grave digger.

He watched me. “How far will a bullet go into the ground?”

I looked up at him. “Usually about a foot, depending on the weapon and the composition of the soil.” I shoveled out another scoop. “Rocks can deflect a bullet quite a ways, so you can never be completely sure where they might go. How far away was he when he fired?”

He thought about it. “Twenty yards. He was truly crazed.”

I scooped out another. “He still is.”

Henry moved in and passed the wand over the hole, but the detector didn't respond. We looked at each other, and then he waved the thing over the pile of dirt I'd shoveled to the side; suddenly, it lit up and squealed.

“Bingo.” I kneeled down and began sifting through the dirt with my fingers, feeling for the slug. “I'd say your powers of recollection are pretty amazing, Mr. Heiple.”

He stood there, arm in arm with my undersheriff.
“Perhaps, but if you've ever been shot at, and I'm sure you have, you tend to remember it.” He paused for a moment and then continued, almost apologetically. “I was with Company One, Thirty-third Armored Regiment, Third Armored Division, First U.S. Army in the Battle of the Bulge. We were raw recruits brought in to replace the men who had been killed in the initial German offensive. On my first night, there we were deployed in the third Sherman tank that my crew had been given, the first two having been destroyed. We were guarding the fuel dump at Francorchamps above Stavelot late one night. I was smoking a cigarette and listening to the bats flying around my head outside my assistant-driver hole. After a moment the older and much more experienced driver poked his head out of his hatch, looked at me, and said, “You do know you're being shot at with that damned cigarette, don't you?” So I threw it over the side and scrambled in; then he told me that I'd just flicked a lit cigarette into a field of cans containing 124,000 gallons of gasoline.”

I breathed a laugh and thought about the neo-Nazi reality star living next door as I carefully plucked the bullet from the dirt. I brushed it off and held it up into the moonlight—a perfectly mushroomed .40 slug. “You never forget your first time.”

“What good is it having a daughter who works for the attorney general if I can't get a confidential piece of information every once in a while?” I could feel her fuming three hundred miles to the south as I sat there watching the sun come up, thankful that I'd finally gotten some sleep. “That information is with the courts, and I don't have any pull over there.” She paused and then growled, “I just started last week—I don't have any pull over here, either. If it's a blanket bail, then they don't have to disclose who supplied the money, Dad.”

“Could you make a few phone calls for me?”

“I can't believe you're asking me to compromise my position.”

“Heck, if you weren't there, I'd be calling the attorney general himself and hitting him up.” I waited a moment before changing the subject. “How's the painting going?”

Her tone brightened a little but not much. “It looks really great, and Lola seems to like it. Speaking of, how's her namesake?”

I yawned. “Probably going to the women's prison in Lusk before this is all over with.”

“Really?”

“I don't know. I'm concerned about her son being hurt, but with the death of a federal agent, that's kind of taken a backseat. Every time I think I've got something nailed down in this case, something worse happens that just complicates it.”

“You'll figure it out; you always do.”

“Right.”

“There was a big article in the Cheyenne paper that they got from the AP wire about the Save Jen campaign and the High Plains Dinosaur Museum. Wasn't a very good photo of you, though.”

“Yep, I saw it in the Rapid City paper.”

She laughed. “You're a big deal.”

“Right.”

“Stop saying ‘right.'”

I held my tongue.

“I found a nice lady who's been doing day care for
our
Lola. Her name is Alexia Mendez; they've got an extended family here in Cheyenne.”

“She's nice?”

“Yes, and she's over six feet tall and probably three hundred pounds.”

“Does Lola like her?”

“Crazy about her.”

“Well then, she's okay by me.”

“When are you and Henry coming down here for a visit?”

I sighed and leaned back in the folding chair on the old flagstone patio near our room at the motel and watched Dog as he watered the vicinity. “What about Dog?”

“Dog is always welcome, even when you're not.”

The phone went dead in my hand. I deposited it in my jacket
pocket as the aforementioned beast came over and set his hundred and fifty pounds on my foot. “How you doin', buddy?”

He wagged and lolled his head back to look at me.

“I gave up breakfast so we could have quality time, so have some time of quality, will you?”

I scratched the fur under his chin just as a man in full motorcycle regalia—boots, torn jeans, black T-shirt, well-worn leather jacket, hair tied back under an American flag do-rag, Ray-Ban sunglasses over his eyes—made the corner at the other end of the motel. I watched him approach the door to our room.

I cleared my throat loudly. “Can I help you?”

He looked at me and walked over the rest of the way but slowed a little when Dog stood. “Is he friendly?”

I got up and extended a hand. “Unless you're a honey-baked ham.”

He patted Dog's head, and we shook. “Sheriff Longmire, I presume?” His voice was soft with a bit of California in it.

“Yep. You John Stainbrook?”

He pulled out a badge wallet hanging on a chain under his T-shirt and showed me his credentials, then dropped the badge back in its hiding place and gestured with a hand that had a lot of rings and tattoos on it. “If you could gimme some ID.”

I pulled my badge wallet from my pocket and handed it to him.

“Sorry. Saw that photo of you in the paper yesterday, but you can't be too careful in my line of business.” He took his time looking at it and then handed it back. “What have you got for me?”

“Other than the slug we dropped off last night with DCI?”

His face stiffened under what looked like a beard on a Persian statue, ringlets and all. “I'd just like to hear your version before we go any further.”

I gestured toward the other chair, and he sat. “Not much I can tell you other than what you already know, but I was hoping that if we shared our collective info we could make some headway on this.”

He nodded. “I'm hoping as well, but to do that I need to know what you know. This is a federal investigation, and even though I appreciate your intimacy with the situation, I'm going to need to see your cards first.”

“Okay.” I leaned back in my chair and told him about the first meeting with Post and, more important, about the second, when he had told Henry and me who he was.

“He told you who and what he was?”

“Yep.”

Stainbrook, looking all the world like some ancient philosopher, shook his head and pulled at the beard. “Then he must've been under a lot of pressure. Brady never did that anywhere with anybody.”

“I've got a trustworthy face.”

He stood and walked a little away, finally standing at the edge of the patio and looking at the river. “Tell me about the hit.”

“Textbook. Somebody, and we think we know who, placed the barrel of a .40 at his chest while he was either sleeping or resting in the Cadillac. No prints, nothing.”

“Lola Wojciechowski's Caddy?”

“Yep.” I stood up. “Hey, do you want to tell me what her connection to all of this might be?”

He turned and looked at me, even going to the trouble of
taking off his sunglasses. “Her son, Bodaway, was moving guns for the Tre Tre Nomads, but then he got into business with some folks up this way and things got a lot heavier.”

“In what way?”

“Know anything about ASPs?”

I shook my head and thought about it, finally throwing out a feeble bone. “Alleged Sensory Perception?”

“Advanced synthetic polymers.”

“Well, look what the cat dragged in!”

We both turned to see Lola standing on the ramp of the parking lot that led to the cabins, hands on her hips.

Stainbrook was faster than I was. “Lola, baby! I was just askin' this cowboy where I could find you.” He walked over to her, and they shared an embrace before turning back to me, arm in arm.

She gave me a hard look, flipping the black and silver hair from her face. “Where the hell is my car?”

“Excuse me?” I had to think fast and come up with a story so that she didn't just stroll into the Hulett Police Department looking for it.

“My Caddy, where the hell is it?”

I struck on a scenario. “Impound in Rapid City—evidently there was a speeding violation and a number of parking tickets.”

She stared at me. “You've got to be joking.”

“Wish I were.”

She turned back to Stainbrook. “Have you two met formally?”

He immediately stuck the same hand out I'd shook before, but this time he had a newfound name. “Ray Swift. Good to meet you. Any friend of Lola's is a friend of mine.”

I shook the hand now turned covert. “Well, I don't know if I'd call us friends—maybe just acquaintances.”

“Oh, Sheriff, now you've hurt my feelings.”

He made a show of double-taking me. “Sheriff?”

“Yep.”

He glanced at her again. “You hangin' with law-dawgs now?”

“Friend of a friend.” She hugged him closer. “Buy me breakfast and gimme a ride over to Rapid City so I can get my car?”

“Well, there's a problem with that.” He turned her, and they started to head back toward the center of town. “Let's go have breakfast, Lola, and I'll explain.” He looked over his shoulder at me and winked. “I'll catch you later, Sheriff . . . ?”

“Longmire. Walt Longmire.”

“Right.” He made a gun with a forefinger and cocked it at me, firing wide.

“I'm sure we'll be seeing each other.” I patted my leg and Dog came over, sitting on my foot again as we watched them jangle up the hill and across the parking lot, leaving me to thank the heavens that my facet of law enforcement was a little more straightforward. I'd briefly dipped into undercover work, but I always had trouble remembering who I was—and that stuff wore me out.

I scratched behind Dog's ears again and thought about the two-inch cube of plastic I'd found in Post's motel room. “Advanced synthetic polymers—that ring any bells with you?”

He wagged, and I took it as a yes.

“Well, it sure doesn't with me.”

 

• • •

“Advanced synthetic polymers.”

“That's what he said, but then Lola showed up, as she is wont to do, and we had to change gears. Evidently she knows him as Ray Swift.”

Vic shook her head. “I need a player card.”

“I know.” We leaned on the trunk of the Orange Blossom Special as the Bear finished up an interview with
Iron Horse
, a biker/girlie magazine. “So, the cube we found in Post's room takes on a new importance. I'm not sure what it is exactly, but at least we know it's part of the equation.” I looked at Vic. “I'll just have to get Stainbrook/Swift alone so that we can acquire more information.”

She studied Henry as he talked to the reporter. “Well, we know the one thing that'll distract her more than anything else.”

“True.”

She reached in the window and petted Dog, who was commanding the driver's seat. “You think they're going to make him take his clothes off?”

“I think it's only naked women in that magazine, but times change.”

“You're just jealous, because he's getting as much print as you are.” She studied me for a moment and then took my arm and led me around to the other side of the vehicle, where we were relatively shaded from public view. Once there, she reached underneath her leather jacket, pulled her signature Glock 19, and handed it to me.

“What's this?” I glanced at the Bear and the interviewer, who were paying us no mind. “You want me to speed up the interview?”

“You know, I'm glad that you came to me with this, because if you had gone to Stainbrook or DCI, they would've said, ‘You know, we gotta get rid of this dumb-ass Longmire, because he's so amazingly stupid.'” She pointed at the wicked-looking semiautomatic in my hands. “Advanced synthetic polymer.”

“Plastic guns?”

“Partially.” She shook her head at me. “Realizing your technical advancement pretty much stops at muzzle loaders, I thought I'd save you some embarrassment.” She pointed at the plastic portions of her sidearm. “ASPs.”

“Oh.” I handled the Glock, feeling again how lightweight it was compared to my Colt 1911. “So, how long have they been doing these things again?”

“There were earlier versions, but the ones that are popular now stemmed from the Austrian military and police service in the early '80s.”

“Gaston Glock, right?”

“The Safe Action pistol, polymer-framed, short-recoil-operated, locked-breech semiautomatic.” She leaned against the car's shiny flanks. “There was a bunch of shit about the reliability of a
plastic
gun, but that little baby right there holds the lion's share of sales to American law enforcement agencies, at, like, sixty-five percent.”

“So what's the big deal about advanced synthetic polymers if they've been around for thirty-five years?”

“I don't know.” She took her sidearm and stuffed it back in her pancake holster. “Even the tan color of the cube is no big deal—they've been making that color for years. Hell, three-quarters of the guys in Afghanistan and Iraq are carrying them.” She stretched, raising her arms, which drew her shirt
from her jeans, revealing her midriff. “And we still don't know who the second ATF agent happens to be?”

“Nope.”

“I don't think it's Lola.”

I couldn't help but chuckle. “I don't think so, either.”

The Cheyenne Nation finished up with the fourth estate and came over, resting his back on the Tangerine Dream along with us.

“You make the centerfold?”

“I refused to be airbrushed.” He raised an eyebrow and shook his head at her. “I feel like such a piece of meat.”

“We have a job for you. Your ex has attached herself to the ATF CO, and I need to talk to him about this ASP thing.”

We loaded into the General Lee and drove toward the center of all things Hulett. Vic shut the growling engine off and glanced around at the milling motorcyclists, just now dragging themselves out of bed after their previous night's revelries. “When are all these people going to go home and return to being a problem for their local law enforcement agencies?”

I pulled the handle, stepped into the alley, and caught a chorus of a garage-band version of Lynyrd Skynyrd's “Simple Man
.
” “It'll start winding down the day after tomorrow.”

“So, the clock is ticking?”

“In more ways than one.” I turned to Henry. “How do you want to play this?”

He clasped the bridge of his nose with a thumb and forefinger. “It will not be hard; as soon as she figures out that he does not have a car, she will attempt to employ her namesake.”

“You think you can get word to Stainbrook that we're out back?”

“I think so. What do you want me to tell Lola when we get to Rapid and her car is not there?”

“Knowing her, she's not going to go into the sheriff's office voluntarily, so you can just come back out and tell her that it was returned to Hulett, compliments of the South Dakota taxpayers.”

“You are sure that DCI will be through with it later today?”

“One can hope, but if not, we'll deal with that burning bridge when we get to it.” Without another word, we watched as he disappeared through the beer garden into the restaurant proper.