Badlands (15 page)

“According to Klein's wife, the foot doesn't belong to Klein,” Maxfield said to the deputy who'd inquired, “unless Klein got the tattoo very recently. When he was home two weeks ago in Bemidji he didn't have it. So a direct connection between the two cases is pretty unlikely.”

*   *   *

CASSIE STEPPED
back as the deputies milled out of the room. She wanted to talk to both Ian Davis and Lance Foster, but not together. She hoped to have a few words with Davis first.

As the men gathered their coats and left the room, she heard most of a bad joke Jim Klug was telling to another deputy.

Klug said, “So Ole is walking down the railroad tracks with his wife Lena and he sees a foot and he says, ‘Lena, that looks like Joe's foot!' Then he walks a few hundred feet further and sees a hand and says, ‘Lena, that looks like Joe's hand!' Then a trunk, and he says, ‘Lena, that looks like Joe's trunk!' Finally, Ole sees a head on the tracks and picks it up by the ears and shakes it and says, ‘Joe, Joe, are you all right?'”

The other deputy laughed but stopped abruptly when he noticed Cassie was watching them.

“Cop humor,” Klug explained, “mixed with Norwegian humor.”

“It's okay,” Cassie said with a smile. “I kind of like that one.”

*   *   *

LANCE FOSTER
went by in a scrum of other deputies and Cassie let him go. She didn't want to single him out.

Cam Tollefsen gave her an inscrutable dead-eye cop stare as he passed her and she gave it right back although she felt a shiver go up her spine. She didn't even know the man but she knew, right then, that he'd be a challenge to her. And maybe worse.

Ian Davis shouldered on a ratty backpack and was one of the last to leave.

“Officer Davis, could I talk to you for a minute?”

He gave her the once-over, then chinned toward the far corner of the room, and ambled over there. She followed.

He stopped and turned. He was Cassie's height—short—and had soulful brown eyes that were slightly suspicious. But he looked the part he played, she thought. Scruffy, a bit down on his luck, like he'd recently walked off the Amtrak train at the station.

After introducing herself again, she said, “How long have you been working the street here?”

“A year and a half. Six more months and I go back to patrol. Believe me, I never thought I'd look forward to shaving in the morning and putting on the uniform again, but I am. It's pretty raggedy-ass out there.”

“So would you say you've got a pretty good handle on the local players?”

Davis shrugged, but said, “Yeah. It's harder than hell to keep track of the transients through here these days—there's a lot of them. But there were knuckleheads here before the boom and a few of them are still around. They're like the farmers—if they stuck they're getting rich.”

“Interesting. Are you talking about dealers in particular?”

“Yes. Everything pretty much starts and ends with drugs around here.”

“Is there a go-to local guy? Someone you'd point to who has his ear to the ground?”

“Oh, yeah,” Davis said. “Willie Dietrich. The sheriff's run him out of the county more than once but he keeps coming back. He's learned how to operate in the shadows, you know? He's got guys to take the fall for him so he can still look clean. I've sort of met him and I know he's got his fingers in everything around here. My goal before I go back on patrol is to nail that douche bag.”

“Willie Dietrich,” she said, committing the name to memory.

“What else do you know?” she asked, careful not to reveal why she was asking. “What are they talking about on the street?”

He looked away for a moment, as if gathering his thoughts. Then, “It's kinda weird out there right now. I told the sheriff about it last week, and it's nothing I can put my finger on. But it's like all the players are bunkered in and keeping their mouths shut. They've gone all low profile. Do you watch movies?”

“Less since my son was born,” Cassie said.

“You know how in
The Godfather
the bad guys all ‘go to the mattresses' before a war? It's like that.

“But the biggest topic of conversation,” he said, “is that meth and heroin are at a premium right now and that's unusual. I have to say that as hard as we work it, there's usually like a flood of drugs coming in from every direction. But the flow's been cut off and nobody is saying why because I think they don't know. I wish it was because we've done a huge bust or put the screws to the douche bags, but that isn't the case. When the supply goes down the price goes up, and tweekers get desperate.”

Cassie asked, “Has the supply line been cut?”

Davis shrugged. “It seems like it, at least temporarily. Blue meth has gone from two hundred a gram to four hundred in the last week. Funny thing is it isn't really blue at all. The cookers make it blue with food coloring because of that TV show. But whether it's white or blue, that's a big jump in price. Same thing with heroin. I'm sure they'll figure a way around it, though. They always do.”

She thanked him and asked for his cell phone number.

He nodded and told it to her which meant, she thought, he felt he could trust her at least to some degree.

“Don't worry if I don't answer it right away,” he said, “I'll call back when I can. Sometimes I'm in the middle of a situation and I can't have the caller ID come up, ‘Bakken County Sheriff.'”

“I understand,” she said with a chuckle, and gave him her cell number. “It's my private phone and it has a four-oh-six Montana prefix, not the department. If something of interest comes up, call me direct.”

He said he would.

*   *   *

CASSIE CAUGHT
up with Sheriff Kirkbride in the hallway as he was headed for his office.

“How's the apartment?” he asked. “Did you get settled in?”

“It's wonderful,” she said. “I'm fine. I was wondering if you had a minute to talk about a couple of things. Plus, I want to know about a guy named Willie Dietrich.”

Kirkbride shot out his arm and looked at his watch. “Willie, huh? He's a piece of work. But I can't meet now. I've got a county commission meeting starting in ten minutes. They have an item on the agenda to ban any further man camps in the county, and I've got to weigh in what a dumb idea that is.”

“It is?” Cassie asked, surprised.

“Think about it,” Kirkbride said as he paused at his door. “We've got hundreds of men showing up every week who need a place to crash. They're building houses like crazy right now but not fast enough to keep up with demand. Those man camps are clean, safe, and well-run—most of 'em, anyway. Where are those men supposed to live while the new housing units are being built over the winter? It's a dumb idea.

“Plus,” Kirkbride said, his face flushing red, “they've invited twelve damned Red Chinese politicians to the county who say they want to invest. Commie reds, Chicoms—here in North Dakota! The commissioners want me to provide security for them while they walk around in their suits and loafers. Can you believe that?”

“Anyway,” she said, prompting him. “I read the files and I agree we have a gang problem. And maybe more than that.”

“I'll be back this afternoon,” he said. “Come by after lunch.”

“Okay.”

“Cassie”—he grinned at her—“I'm glad you said
we
.”

 

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

KYLE ARRIVED
home from delivering newspapers and noticed that T-Lock had finally wrapped a thick chain around the washing machine and secured it with a stout padlock. That meant, Kyle thought, T-Lock was trying to get on his mom's good side by finally doing what she'd been asking him to do for more than a year.

T-Lock and Kyle's mother were sitting at the kitchen table. It was obvious to him they'd been having an argument they didn't want him to overhear by the way they both shut up the instant he came in through the back door.

Their silence hung in the air while Kyle untied his pack boots and hung his heavy coat on a peg. His cheeks were numb from the cold and his skin hurt as the warmth from the kitchen enveloped him.

“Cold out there?” T-Lock asked, fake jaunty.

Instead of answering, Kyle looked at his mom. She was wearing her McDonald's tunic and black pants, her hair in a ponytail. Her uniform and the way she put up her hair made her look young. She shot a glance at him and he was taken aback by how she looked. Her eyes were red and half-closed and her face was puffy. She must have realized what she looked like to him because she quickly turned away and stared at the table. She held a coffee mug between her hands as if trying to crush it into powder.

Kyle said, yes, it was cold.

“Kyle, why don't you go get dressed for school now? Your mom and I are in the middle of a discussion,” T-Lock said. Even from where he stood, four feet away, Kyle could smell T-Lock's morning breath. It hung in the air and it was a rancid combination of coffee and cigarette smoke.

“I'm hungry,” Kyle said, eying a half-eaten box of powdered donuts on the table. While delivering newspapers that morning all he could think of were two things: eating a hot breakfast when he got home and asking T-Lock for enough money to buy a hand-held GPS. The GPS would come in handy on the river in Raheem's boat.

“Here,” T-Lock said as he closed the box and flung the whole thing at Kyle. He caught it against his stomach. “Go eat that—we're done with it. Just give your mom and me a minute, okay,
Kyle?
”

He said Kyle's name with a nasty inflection.

Kyle said to his mom, “You okay?”

“I'm fine, honey,” she said, looking up again briefly then back to her reflection in the mug of coffee. “I'm sorry about last night. I didn't mean to upset you.”

“He's
fine,
” T-Lock said, raising his voice. “He's fine. You're fine. We're all fucking
fine
.”

“Tracy, please,” Kyle's mother said.

T-Lock glared at Kyle with strange intensity, Kyle thought. He looked unhinged. Kyle decided he would stay where he was to prevent T-Lock from hurting his mom.

She said to Kyle, “It's okay, Kyle. Let us talk for a minute.”

Kyle didn't like it that she was on T-Lock's side. But she didn't seem frightened. Kyle shrugged and took his half full box of donuts to his bedroom. He'd ask about the money for the GPS later, when T-Lock was in one of his mellow moods.

After all, Kyle thought, it was really
his
money—not T-Lock's.

And T-Lock had been stupid about saying he should get “dressed for school,” Kyle thought. He was dressed for school already: jeans, Grimstad Vikings hoodie. They were the clothes that he had. It's what he wore every day.

He sat down at his desk with the box of donuts and took one out. They'd been in the kitchen for a few days and were dried out, but the powdered sugar coating was good. After he'd devoured the first one he licked his fingers and plucked out another.

Kyle could overhear the conversation going on in the kitchen but he couldn't understand it all. He knew, though, that if T-Lock tried to hurt his mom he'd protect her. So he got prepared.

He dropped to his hands and knees and reached under his bed to retrieve the cardboard box he called his “River Box.” It was filled with things he'd been collecting from Dumpsters, construction sites, and lost-and-found boxes for the last few months that he thought he might need when they pushed off on the Missouri: rope, wire, electrician's tape, hand tools, fishing line and fishing lures, extra clothes, a cool captain's hat. It was amazing what people threw away or left behind. Kyle dug into the box and found the crossbow arrow Winkie had shot into their door when his mom got so mad at T-Lock's friend.

The twenty-inch arrow was bent from the impact and from pulling it out of the wood and it was of no use to Winkie and his crossbow again. The paint was scraped off the shaft and the fletching was fouled. But the four-blade broadhead was razor sharp, even though it had been fired through the wood door.

If T-Lock ever hurt his mom, Kyle vowed, he'd stick that arrow into T-Lock's neck.

Kyle ate donuts and fingered the tip of the arrow as their voices carried.

T-Lock said, “I already told you, I've thought this all out. You've got to trust me on this. Quit worrying about it so much.
You're
not doing anything wrong.”

“But it feels wrong. You're asking me to wash all the cash.”

“It's called laundering, not washing, for Christ sake. And you're not stealing from anybody or cheating anyone. You're just replacing cash in the register with cash from that bag. You replace a twenty from the register with one from the bag. A ten for a ten. A five for a fucking five. It's simple as hell. And when they count up the money everything balances and nobody will even know.”

“Still, you said the money is marked. What if somebody checks it out and finds it?”

“For Christ sake, woman, how would they even know where it came from? You don't replace it all at once like a dumbass. You slip it in one bill at a time through the day. If you give some rube two fives in change, you give him one marked five and one clean one from the drawer. But you've got to keep the count in your head and make sure you put a marked five back in the drawer to take the place of the one you handed out. That's the only tough part of this—remembering not to get the money mixed up. You don't want the count to come up too short or too long. You want it to balance at the end of the day.”

“What about the cameras, though? What if someone sees me?”

“We've been over that. The cameras are set up in back of you over your shoulder so they can see anyone at the counter trying to rob the place. They can see the top of your shoulders, the back of your head, the counter, and the rube ordering hamburgers. They can't see anything you're doing below waist level. So when you take the cash from your pocket and put it in the drawer they can't see it.”