Brown-Eyed Girl (35 page)

John-Boy, a blur in sparkling chef's whites, was doing ten things at once, but he took a moment to admire Burt. His partner was decked out in a yellow suede western-cut jacket, a white pleated tuxedo shirt, a bolo tie set with the biggest piece of turquoise north of Santa Fe, pressed Levi's 501s, and red lizard cowboy boots. Wowser. “They're just hors d'oeuvre portions, Burt. We can make do with cocktail picks. Now don't bug me, baby, I've gotta finish off the pizza puttanesca.”

“I wonder where Sally is,” Dwayne repeated, moving over to tune his fiddle.

“Dwayne, can you come here a minute and help me with these goddamn champagne glasses? Everything has to be perfect in exactly twenty minutes, or somebody here is going to get taken out and shot!” Delice warned.

The first thing Danny Crease did when he got Sally Alder inside Meg Dunwoodie's house was to slap her in the face so hard, her brain rattled. “You and I have a little business to do,
Professor
Alder. Let's make it quick.” He slapped her again.

Sally staggered, fell back on the couch. Tears ran down her face. She didn't recognize the man pointing a gun at her, but she had an idea who he was: the unclaimed Unknown Soldier. Still, she had to ask. “Who are you?” she cried. “What do you want?”

Danny sat next to her on the couch, gripping her arm and holding the barrel of his Beretta against her ear. “If you cooperate with me,
right now,
I won't kill you.” Yet. “I want to know where the rest of Mac Dunwoodie's Krugerrands are.” He didn't much like touching a Jew. It made him feel dirty.

Sally looked at him in shock. “There aren't any Krugerrands. Did Elroy Foote tell you there were?”

Danny hit her again, just for fun. He loved the way that little stream of blood was leaking out of the side of her mouth. He had to watch it, though. He needed her conscious for what he had in mind. “Meg Dunwoodie told him herself. Now where are they, before I change my mind and decide to kill you first and then have a look for myself.” He punched her hard in the ribs to make his point.

Sally was nearly hysterical from terror and pain, and the question put her over the top. She gagged and gasped, trying to get enough air to say something, or he would surely beat her to death. “I'm telling you. You can kill me and look all you want, but you won't find what you're looking for. I know that for a fact. Meg Dunwoodie sold every fucking Krugerrand her father left her, to your friend Elroy Foote. I'm telling you the truth. There's not a damned thing in this house you'd want to steal.” A man like this, some recess of her brain whispered, would not want Meg's poems, or Giselle's paintings.

“Yeah,” said Danny, “Jews are famous for telling the truth, especially when it comes to money.” He looked around at the fancy furnishings, the crystal and the silver, but he wasn't in the market for stuff it would be more trouble to fence than was worth his time. If she was lying, he didn't have time to find out. His watch said 7:10—he needed to get her to the restaurant before somebody came looking for her. He could have shot her there, could have spent a little time looking around the house, and then gone to the party and killed Dickie. But somebody might come looking for Alder, and he had other plans for her. It was time to make a statement.

The Civic was still parked in the bank lot. He'd grab Dickie and take him out on the prairie for a chat before he let him die. Nobody would follow. Earlier in the day, Danny had left a small package by the alley door of the Yippie I O Cafe. The package contained an ordinary pipe bomb, fancied up with a little radio transmitter. The triggering device was in his pocket. He would press it at the moment that he took Dickie out the front door. The bomb would go off right next to the kitchen—no great loss. A couple less faggots and their friends to stink up the world.

“Get up, filth,” he told Sally, dragging her to her feet. “We're going to a party. We'll take your car,” Danny said, reaching in her purse for the keys.

When Steve Baca walked into the Yippie I O, Delice handed him a glass of champagne and gave him a very nice kiss. Their relationship had recently transcended the pizza oven. “You're just in time. The lobster pizza puttanesca is almost ready.” Having given up the pretense of not owning the restaurant, Delice returned to the place by the cash register where she always felt most comfortable. She was frantically busy, but it occurred to her to wonder where Sally was.

Steve, meanwhile, made his way through the crush. The small bandstand was empty, the music planned for later. The place was packed with Laramie citizens slamming down wild mushroom pâté and Vietnamese spring rolls. Everyone had obviously arrived on time, to be there before the food ran out. Dickie Langham had one arm around his beautiful daughter Brit, and the other cradling a plate of high-end goodies large enough to feed Steve's whole firehouse.

Steve saluted Dickie with his champagne, but the fire chief looked worried. It wasn't the pizza oven, which he'd finally approved. Both Burt and John-Boy were standing near it, looking harried but happy and awaiting what Burt called “the pizza de resistance.” Steve was just a fireman in a crowded restaurant. The instinct for a spot check was too strong to resist.

One part of the kitchen, the part with the pizza oven, was out in the open, but the back kitchen, where the main ovens and preparation areas were, was in the back. Steve strolled back, found the temperature as hot as it always is in restaurant kitchens in full swing, but not alarming, and headed out the back door for a breath of cool air. Just as he was noticing the small package next to the door, he heard a commotion in the front room.

Sheriff Dickie Langham didn't see Steve head toward the back. He was preoccupied with the very good food, with wondering what kind of maniac would latch onto Brit next, and with the thought that Sally Alder would never be late for an opening night. Except tonight, when everybody else in southern Wyoming had managed to be on time. Dickie observed that even Nattie, who always liked to make an entrance, was already present, ordering Jerry Jeff to get her a refill on champagne.

“They won't give me champagne, Aunt Nattie,” Jerry Jeff protested, “I'm only twelve,” as his cousin Josh, two years older, snagged a bottle from the bar and dragged him off into a corner.

Hawk Green arrived a little late, still wet from the shower. He'd had a great day in the field, scouting prospects in the kimberlite pipes down on the state line, and he was looking forward to spending much of the summer there, showing his students how to look for industrialgrade diamonds. He doubted there would be gem-quality diamonds, but you never could tell. If the students found anything interesting, Hawk would probably have to cancel a trip to Alaska he'd planned for August.

The place was already packed. Hawk hadn't managed to penetrate the crowd, but the food and drink had come to him. He was standing near the front door, eating a tasty scallop thing served in a small seashell, and chatting with Edna McCaffrey and Tom Youngblood.

Hawk couldn't imagine what had happened to Sally. As he knew, she was a flake in many ways, but Sally was always punctual. He didn't have long to worry, however, as the Mustang turned the corner onto Ivinson and parked out front, in the no-parking zone.

But Sally wasn't driving. There was someone with her. Hawk wondered what was wrong with her. She was all hunched over to one side, as if her ribs hurt. Her face was swollen and turning purple, one eye puffed up half-shut, the other wide in horror. Hawk's Smith and Wesson was in the glove box of his truck. He put his plate on a table and started for the door.

But Hawk was a moment too late. Hustling, Danny Crease pushed Sally in the door of the Yippie I O Cafe, holding her in a hammer lock with the Beretta nestled up under her ear. “Nobody moves,” he shouted. The place was so crowded, it took a minute for people to quiet down. Dickie Langham took in the scene in a heartbeat and pushed people away from him. He'd worn a shoulder holster under his jacket. Couldn't get to his gun, and wouldn't dare anyway.

“Danny Crease,” said Dickie. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Remember when you used to be a coke dealer, Sheriff?” Danny screamed. A number of the people present gasped; a number of others remembered. “Remember how you were a thief as well as a drug pusher? It's been fifteen years, Langham. You ran out the back door owing me twelve and a half grand, and you should have kept on running a little longer. But then again, nobody who cheats me ever runs long enough. I have a very good memory, and I'm here to collect every fucking penny you owe me.”

The crowd began to murmur, but Danny hollered,
“Shut up!”
and shoved the gun a little harder against Sally's head. Everyone fell silent. Hawk stood perfectly still, watching and waiting. Beside him, his teammate from “Old, But Slow” was tensed like a spring.

“I'll kill this bitch, I swear it, Langham. But I'd rather have you.” He rammed the barrel of the gun yet harder, knocking against the base of Sally's skull. The pain penetrated a little of her shock, and for the first time, her eyes focused and she saw Hawk. He looked hard at her and told her silently, with a very slight shake of his head, to think, and to be ready.

Several in the crowd shuffled, and Danny yelled
“SHUT UP!”
again. “I swear, anyone here makes one move, and she's dead.”

Dickie's eyes had gone dull and cold, but his voice came friendly and laid back. “Let her go and I'm all yours, Crease,” he said, moving slowly toward the front and wondering how he could signal somebody to create a distraction. “But don't you want to stay and try the hors d'oeuvres?”

At the mention of hors d'oeuvres, Burt and John-Boy shot each other a look of panic. Frozen to the floor, they'd forgotten all about the pizza puttanesca. John-Boy's sensitive nose caught the first whiff of burning anchovies, olives, semolina crust, and lobster morsels. The anchovies and cornmeal burst into flame first. In a heartbeat, a cloud of black oily smoke rolled out of the brick hearth, and people began to tear up and cough. Even Danny Crease felt the tears gushing out of his eyes, his lungs seizing up and spasming.

Finding some last reserve of energy and, remarkably, some remnant of a women's self-defense course she'd taken twenty years ago in Berkeley, Sally stomped hard on Danny's instep just as Hawk Green hit him with a tackle at the knees and Tom Youngblood wrenched the Beretta from his hand. The gun went off, a bullet flying through the front window, spraying a shower of glass over the street. Byron Bosworth, who was watching the whole thing from a barstool across the street at the Buckhorn, choked on a pickled egg.

As Danny went down, he decided he'd take as many of these subhumans with him as he could. He managed to get a hand in his pocket, and pressed the bomb control as people rushed out the door past him, coughing and crying. But nothing happened. When the smoke cleared, all Danny saw was Sally Alder huddling in the arms of one of the guys who'd hit him, two guys holding blackened, smoking pizza pans, and about a dozen party-goers—fine, well-armed citizens—pointing their pistols at him. The sheriff was yanking him up, pulling his hands behind his back, cuffing him tight. The bomb control clattered to the floor. The sheriff's sister, holding a Colt .45, put her face right up to Danny's and said, “We'll bill you for the damage.”

Then Steve Baca came walking up, black eyes glowing, holding Danny's defused pipe bomb. “Pretty primitive device,” said the fire chief to the piece of slime being hauled off the floor. “Did you leave any more of these around here?”

Chapter 34
Ride Me High

“You want a beefsteak for that eye?” asked Hawk Green as he eased Sally into the big tub full of bubbles in Meg Dunwoodie's green bathroom, handed her two Advils and an extra-large whiskey, sat down on the floor next to the tub, and dipped a washcloth in the water.

“Does steak really help?” Sally asked, wincing as he gently touched the washcloth to her battered face.

“Probably not, but it has the ring of folk wisdom, doesn't it?”

Sally tried to grin through an upper lip that was split and swelling fast. She failed. Her ribs ached, but Doc Anderson, who'd fortunately been among those pounding down spring rolls and champagne at the Yippie I O, said nothing was broken.

“I think ice would be better.” An arm snaked through the half-open bathroom door, holding a Ziploc bag full of ice. “Reduces the swelling.”

“What are you doing here, Maude?” Sally mumbled. “It's eleven o'clock at night.”

“I was watching the ten o'clock news from Cheyenne and they had a story about a ‘hostage crisis' at a restaurant opening in Laramie. I called Delice, and she told me what happened . I came to see if you were all right,” Maude said from behind the door. “Are you?”

“Yeah, I'm great,” Sally said. “Goddamn it, Hawk, go easy on that eye with the ice.”

“Yeah, Hawk. What are you trying to do, kill her?” came another voice from behind the door.

“That's right, Sheriff,” said Hawk sourly. “This is her bonus day for attempted murders. Why aren't you down at the jail, beating the shit out of your prisoner?”

“I'm leaving that to the FBI. They'll be here in the morning,” Dickie answered.

“Everything's under control here,” said Hawk. “You can leave the flowers, candy, and bottles of bourbon in the kitchen. We're not receiving visitors.”

Suddenly the door burst open, and in flew Delice Langham, all ajangle, with half a Telstar worth of red ginger blossoms, orchids, and birds-of-paradise. “God, Sally, are you all right?”

“Never better,” Sally managed, tilting the whiskey into the good side of her mouth. Maude reached in and took the flowers from Delice.

Edna McCaffrey peeked her head around the door. “Hey, this is like one of those sixteenth-century French salons where everybody would come into some noblewoman's boudoir and stand around watching her drop
bon mots
while she put on her underwear,” she said.

“Fresh out of
bon mots
,” Sally said, draining the glass.

“Can't a man give a woman a bath around here without having half of Laramie show up?” Hawk complained.

“Get out,” Sally said.

“We're glad you're not dead,” Delice said cheerfully as they all began to leave. “But the Yippie I O is a mess!”

“And I was just congratulating myself on how boring my life was,” Sally commented.

Considering the number of half-hysterical, armed people who had been present at the eventful opening night of the Yippie I O, it was a downright miracle nobody got shot. There was, unfortunately, one fatality. The bartender at the Buckhorn had been unable to dislodge the large piece of pickled egg from Byron Bosworth's trachea, and he expired on the barroom floor. Bosworth's funeral was very well attended, said Edna McCaffrey, who had to go.

Sally Alder was recovering from the assault by Danny Crease, under the care of Hawk Green, Maude Stark, and a surprising number of people who considered Sally a friend. Even Nattie Langham showed up with a summer sausage giftpack from Hickory Farms (Sally suspected someone had sent it to Nattie and Dwayne for Christmas and they'd never gotten around to eating it).

Danny Crease had been transferred to the more secure state penitentiary at Rawlins. In the wake of the Freedom Ranch debacle, the Teton County sheriff had done some investigating into the deaths of Walt Flanders and Mickey Welsh, both associates of the late Elroy Foote. As a result, Danny was awaiting trial on multiple charges of murder, attempted murder, arson, and assault. Dickie was also looking into the murders of the Mexican nationals on the Snowy Range Road. He had no evidence to connect Danny with those killings, and probably would never be able to make anybody pay, in those cases. He really hoped Danny had been involved. He didn't want to think there might be somebody else out there, murdering helpless people in his county.

On Danny's second day at Rawlins, he received a bill for repairs to the Yippie I O from Delice, in the amount of $12,500.

The United States Justice Department confiscated the Harrier, the tank, and several suspicious vials found in the refrigerator at Freedom Ranch. The vials were being transported, under extremely secure conditions, to the laboratories of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

Mrs. Pamela Appley of Sun Valley, Idaho was suing the Teton County Sheriff's Office, the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigations, the FBI, the ATF, and the United States Forest Service for violating her parents' civil rights.

CNN and several other news outlets were suing the federal government and the estate of Elroy Foote to get money to pay off the workers' compensation claims of the camera crews and correspondents deafened by the blast at Freedom Ranch.

Brittany Langham had decided to do something with her life, but she wasn't exactly sure what. She had written for applications to the University of Wyoming School of Law, the graduate program in history at the University of California, Berkeley, and the FBI Academy.

Bobby Helwigsen had received a $250,000 advance from a major publishing house for a book prospectively titled,
Teton Thunder: My Year Inside the Militia.
He was being represented by the William Morris Agency, and was considering offers including a nationwide radio call-in program and a series of infomercials for products including the Butt-Blaster.

During the next several weeks, the Dunwoodie Foundation agreed to seek Historic Register designation for Meg's house, and to transfer the papers to the archives after one more year. Egan Crain would act as chief curator. The Giselle Blum paintings from the closet were to be the centerpieces for an exhibit of the artist's work at the University Art Museum; while Brit waited to hear from her various schools, she had been hired to write the catalogue copy. The Dunwoodie diamonds had been removed from the vault at the Centennial Bank, and sent via armed courier to a De Beers, Ltd. office in New York, to see if they could be identified.

The Yippie I O Cafe reopened on the Fourth of July. The sushi special was red-white-and-blue rainbow rolls. The Langham boys—Dickie, Dwayne, Josh, and Jerry Jeff—ate four entire rolls apiece. Steve Baca ordered the green chile chicken pizza. Delice hoped that didn't mean he was getting homesick for New Mexico.

Sally Alder's inquiry regarding Margaret Dunwoodie and Ernst Malthus was sitting in an unopened manila envelope at the State Department office that reviewed Freedom Of Information Act requests. It was somewhere in the middle of a large pile of similar envelopes.

And Edna McCaffrey and Tom Youngblood returned, for what was left of the summer, to Katmandu.

Hawk was wrestling the last of Sally's boxes out of Meg Dunwoodie's house, and into his pickup. She was finally taking a bunch of her work stuff to an office on campus. She planned to split her time between Meg's house and the office, spending the year writing the biography of Laramie's greatest poet, Margaret Parker Dunwoodie. She was moving her other stuff into Hawk's house. It would be a little cramped. They would probably have to look for a bigger place.

“Well, we don't need to look right away,” Sally hedged. “What if I decide to go back to UCLA?”

“You ain't goin' nowhere,” said Hawk. “Ride me high, and all that Bob Dylan stuff.”

Sally looked at Hawk. He looked back. She moved toward him. He stood his ground. She put her arms around his neck. He put his arms around her waist. He leaned down and kissed her very sweetly, then very thoroughly.

“I'm moving in with you, Hawk,” she murmured into his ear. “What does this mean?”

“You pay half the mortgage,” he whispered back into her ear.

She looked disappointed.

“Don't worry,” he said, “It's a good deal. I put down a lot of cash.”

“You do love me, don't you?” she had to ask.

“Yeah, I do. I do love you. Now let's get this crap over to my house. I want a beer.”

Maude Stark had decided that Meg's backyard needed a white lilac bush. There was a stand of gladioli that Meg had insisted on putting in, which had never worked out. They were taking up a space that would be perfect for the lilac.

Maude put her shovel under the spindly gladiola shoots and dug deep enough to get under the bulbs. She put them in a plastic pot, thinking maybe there was a place she could transplant them in Hawk (and Sally's) yard. It was good to get out and dig, she thought, working the dirt around the hole loose, and digging deeper, piling dirt outside the hole, making room for the roots of the lilac. Her shovel struck something hard.

Maude bent down and began sifting in the dirt with her hands. Her fingers found it, and she pulled it out of the dirt and wiped it off. One gold Krugerrand. What do you know?

Maude put it in her pocket and began to dig deeper, then thought about it a minute. The hole was already deep enough for a lilac bush. She pulled the coin out of her pocket and dropped it in the bottom of the hole. Shoveled in a little more dirt. Cut the bag off the roots of the lilac, and gently placed it in the hole. Then just as gently, she pushed the rest of the dirt back in the hole, mounding it around the trunk to support the bush. It wouldn't bloom until next year, she thought, going to the potting shed to get some fertilizer.