Junkyard Dogs (13 page)

I took the turn toward Geo’s place but then steered off at the entrance to Redhills Rancho Arroyo, which was announced by a monstrous gateway of hewn logs about the size of my truck. I eased off the throttle so that I could make it through and past the empty guard shack. There was a slight downslope that led along the creek to five rambling million-dollar structures. It was an educated guess, since I’d never been to the Dobbs household, but the lights were on at the one squatting on the precipice of the ridge.

It was, of course, the mansion with the best view of the mountains.

I slid the truck into the driveway, grabbed a wool muffler that was on the seat, unclipped my handheld radio from the dash, and quasi-leapt into the drifts of snow that had collected on the concrete. I made my way to the door beside the wooden and windowed garage doors that probably cost as much as my house.

It was locked, so I pulled my Maglite out and made my way around to the back on the sidewalk that circled through the landscaping surrounded by nonindigenous, Colorado red-rock walls. The large sliding glass door was opened to a deck with light cascading from inside the house that painted stripes across the snow-covered lawn; there was a blood trail to my right.

When I got to the top of the steps, I could see where a few drops of blood had splattered across the travertine tile. There was a golf club lying on the floor, and it had blood on it as well. I stepped in the doorway with my heart palpitating like a friction motor, but there was no Geo.

Somewhere in the house I could hear someone crying, but it was muffled and distant. It was cold inside with more than a little snow blown in on the tile—I closed the door against the slamming of the wind. There was no blood on the thick carpet that led upstairs and, all in all, there was more blood on Ozzie than in the house.

I slipped my flashlight back into my duty belt. “Mrs. Dobbs?” There was no response, but the crying continued. I mounted the suspended steps that overlooked an expansive living room to the left and continued to the second door on the right. I didn’t really want to intrude on the woman, but I needed a more detailed description of what had happened.

I knocked. “Mrs. Dobbs?” I heard a shuffling, and then the sobbing stopped. “Mrs. Dobbs, it’s Walt Longmire. Can I speak to you?”

I listened as she padded to the door and turned the knob. When she saw me, she started crying afresh. “Oh, Walter . . . Oh, my God.”

I leaned down so that I could be on her eye level. “Mrs. Dobbs, where is George Stewart?”

She began really sobbing now, and her hands clutched for the lapels on my coat. “Walter, it was horrible. Ozzie Junior started screaming and George was shouting back at him and then he pushed him . . .”

I tried to get her to look me in the eye. “Mrs. Dobbs, where is Geo?”

She continued to study my duty shirt as she reconstructed. “Ozzie Junior fell, grabbed the golf club, and I swear he only swung it to warn George, but George stepped toward him and . . . and I just ran from the room.” I nudged her chin up with my hand and finally got her to look me in the face. “Walter, Ozzie killed him.”

I thought about the blood trail that I’d followed on the deck steps. “Mrs. Dobbs, did the fight take place in your kitchen?”

She caught her breath and nodded. “Yes.”

“And that’s where you left the two of them?”

“Yes.”

I nodded and tried to smile a little reassurance into her. “Well, your son is at my office, and there’s nobody down in your kitchen. In my profession, dead people tend to stay where they drop, so I think that Geo came to, noticed that nobody was around, and went home.”

“Oh, Walter, do you think so?”

“Yep, I do. Head wounds tend to bleed a lot, but there’s really not enough blood down there to indicate a serious injury.” I straightened. “But if he’s out there wandering around in this cold and snow with any kind of head wound, I have to go find him. Now, the EMTs are going to be here anytime now, and I need you to tell them to sit pat till I call in to them on my radio, okay?”

She sniffed. “Okay.”

“Why don’t you go down in the living room and wait by the front door?” I looked at her seriously. “And don’t go in the kitchen.”

She wiped her eyes with her fists. “I won’t.”

 

 

The weather had stiffened, and it was worse on the ridge above the Redhills Rancho Arroyo’s back nine, with beads of snow sandblasting horizontally and my muscles grinding together like ice floes in a wind-lashed sea.

I couldn’t pick up enough of the blood trail but found a small piece of Geo’s Carhartt flapping on the barbed wire fence where he’d climbed over. I straddled the old three-strand attached to posts so aged they looked as if they might’ve grown there, pulled the tail ends of the muffler up from where it was wrapped around my hat, and played the beam of the big flashlight across the drifts.

I could still see the boot tracks in the foot-deep snow—he hadn’t continued straight but had tacked against the wind. I twisted my hat down harder, so that the aperture between it and my scarf was like the visor on a knight’s helmet, and pressed my face against the inside of my upturned collar. My stomach growled, and I thought about the two burritos lying on Ruby’s desk; Henry had probably fed them to Dog.

I climbed the ridge and looked down at the path that skirted the junkyard/dump and saw where it ended at the back of the Stewart compound. With the abandoned vehicles and trailer houses, it reminded me of Khe Sanh in Vietnam—just a hundred degrees colder.

My radio crackled. Static. “Unit 1, we’re 10-23 at 441 Eagle Ridge.”

I plucked the radio from my belt and hit the button. “That you, Chris?”

Static. “Yeah. Mrs. Dobbs said to contact you for information about the victim.”

I ducked my head to avoid the wind. “Well, get over to George Stewart’s place by the dump and wait for me there. I’m pretty sure that’s where he’s headed.”

Static. “Roger that.”

I replaced the radio back under my coat. The trenches that Geo’s boots had made continued down the canyon edge and arced toward the house. I followed as quickly as I could, but the snow continued to scour slick under my boots and the grade became slippery. I slid a little to the side in an ungainly split and then continued my descent, second-guessing my choice of leaving Henry Standing Bear at the office.

I was about halfway down the grade when I came to a second fence and a copse of naked apple trees crouched by a smaller path that led down the edge of the ravine toward the junkyard. Buried in the hillside across from the frozen idyll was an old cellar door that must’ve been the exit from the clandestine tunnel.

The spot where it had all started with an apple and a kiss.

The drift was at least a foot and a half deep in front of the doors, and they lay there undisturbed like peeling gray gates to the underworld. I couldn’t see the boot prints any longer, so I backed up, crouched down, and panned the beam of the flashlight across the surface of the snow. The only thing I could see were the craters where my boots had broken through the hard crust of the surface. I stood there in a continual riptide of flakes that traveled quickly across the polished snow.

It was as if he’d disappeared.

I peered at the cellar opening again. It was strange, but there was a relatively new clasp and massive padlock hanging against the door, one of those locks with the rubber covering to protect it. There was nothing, though, to give any indication that he’d stood there, unlocked and opened the ancient doors or even continued in that direction. I turned the beam back toward the main pathway and caught sight of one snow-filled print that wasn’t mine. He must have turned and continued down toward the junkyard.

It was a narrow path, just wide enough for a man. There was a wooden gate about two-thirds of the way down, nothing that would keep anybody out if they were serious. The footing was worse than before, and I had to take my time but soon arrived at the level space of the old quarry in the oldest part of the lot. I could date Detroit design by the surrounding stacks of automobiles, massive, skirt-fender beasts from the bulbous forties and sleek, high-finned quarter-panels from the futuristic fifties.

In the junkyard’s protected environs, the wind had lessened, and the snow was wetter so Geo’s tracks were easier to follow. I wondered why, if he was trying to make it back home, he had detoured here.

I made my way down the aisles of stacked vehicles and had just turned the corner at a ’52 Lincoln when I saw eyes looking at me from the gloom of dark and distance. I raised the Maglite into two pairs of bronze iridescence.

The mutt wolves had their teeth showing as they made their deliberate way toward me between the stacked automobiles. I had been the jolly fellow who had freed them from the depressing dump office and taken them home to be fed, but now I was an interloper that they’d found in their assigned territory.

I made my voice stern. “Easy. Easy Butch, easy Sundance . . .”

They showed no sign of stopping, and even though I despised the thought of shooting them, I couldn’t run. I hoped that maybe a warning shot would scare them off and reached down, unsnapping the safety strap from my Colt and fixing my hand around the grip.

At that movement, they froze.

My hand stayed on my sidearm, and I spoke between the snowflakes. “Well, you guys are smarter than I thought.” They didn’t advance, but they didn’t run, either. I stood there for a moment and then shone the flashlight back onto the prints that turned a corner ahead and continued off to the right.

I stepped forward, but they still didn’t move. “All right, let’s call this one a truce. You guys go your way, and I’ll go mine.” I resnapped the holster and made my way around the corner of the Lincoln. They continued to watch me.

I made a cursory cast of the beam back toward the two dogs, but they remained immobile. Then I noticed that there were two sets of prints in this aisle. The new set were different from the junkman’s, larger and with a more outdoor tread, an over-boot of some sort—probably Sorels. For comparative purposes, I placed my rubber-covered foot alongside—smaller than mine, probably a ten or an eleven.

I stayed to one side and followed both sets of tracks to another left. The snow was heavy now, but the wind had died. I looked up at the flakes that made me feel as though I were falling down and saw that some snow had been swiped away from one of the doors of an old, slope-backed, mostly intact Mercury Coupe.

The door hung open, and I could see one of Geo’s antiquated logger boots hanging from the sill, the extended length of untied cord laces drifting back and forth across the open window of the vehicle on which the Mercury rested.

I hustled through the odd lumps of snow-covered junk and parts, finally resting a hand on the door handle of a partially crushed ’47 Chevy that was at ground level.

Geo was slouched forward with a shoulder firmly planted against the steering wheel where the Mercury’s horn would’ve been if it had still had one. He wore the welder’s cap with the upturned flaps, the double troughs having now filled up with snow. The condensation of his breath had frozen his beard into a solid mass and thinned the blood in it so that it seemed transparent and pink. Thin icicles stuck out from his downturned face like porcupine spines.

I fed a fingertip into my teeth and pulled my glove off, wrapping my hand around the junkman’s wrist—the flesh was blue, cold. He looked down at me with the remainders of a faint smile, but it appeared that the glimmer of life was gone from the rime ice at his pupils.

It was also about then that I felt Sundance clamp his jaws into my right butt cheek.

“How’s your ass?”

I responded conversationally. “Fine, how’s yours?”

“Unperforated.”

David Nickerson, Isaac’s new resident, was on EMT duty and had just finished stitching up my posterior when Vic had barged in. I could feel the substantial breeze from the open door of the van and asked her to close it. She did and sat on the wheel-well hump I’d occupied only two days earlier. Vic had gotten Geo Stewart’s body loaded into Durant EMT van number one, and it would appear that we were maxing out the available emergency vehicles for the area on a frozen and very early Wednesday morning.

“You always provide us with the most pleasant environs for our work.”

“I try.”

“I guess I should congratulate you on finding an entirely new place on your body for scars.”

Nickerson straightened behind me. He had applied a large gauze patch over my wound, or at least that’s what it felt like under the dull ache of the local anesthetic with which he’d shot my right cheek. “That’s it.”

I pulled up my underwear and Carhartt overalls, the emergency pair I kept behind the seat of my truck. “You’re sure I’m not going to need any cosmetic work; that is my best side.”

He smiled, and I took a few seconds to study the future of practical medicine in my county. He was a handsome kid with enveloping brown eyes and a comfortable face, one that I was pretty sure I was going to see a lot of in the future. “You sure you’re old enough to be doing this stuff?”

The smile held, and he nodded as he put away the tools of his trade. “Diploma and everything.”

He departed, leaving the van to Vic and me.

I pulled the sleeves up and shrugged on the shoulders, then zipped the front of the insulated suit and straightened the collar. “Geo?”

“Still dead.” She turned her boot sideways, and we both watched as the collected snow slowly slid off. “It looks like the rural Rasputin finally ran out of lives. From a cursory examination, they say massive coronary, but they’ll know more once they get him back to the hospital.”

I thought about it. “Do you think the heart attack was due to the beating?”

She unzipped her duty jacket and studied me. “Difficult to say in all honesty but, if the man had stayed on the floor of the Dobbses’ kitchen or even made it to cover, he might not be dead.”