Junkyard Dogs (15 page)

Duane looked at me as he petted the dogs. “Nunh-uh.”

Vic shrugged.

I brought the glass back up to my lips and took a swig of what, indeed, tasted like ass. I swallowed and looked around, especially at the brunette. “I thought I heard something.”

Duane shook his head. “Nunh-uh, maybe the wind?”

I looked at Vic. “It sounded like somebody crying for help.”

The young man pushed his greasy ball cap farther back onto his head. “I didn’t hear nothing.”

Vic looked at Duane. “I didn’t either.”

I studied the rusty liquid in the glass and took a deep breath as I raised it to my lips. “Well, I damn well better.” Duane continued to watch me, probably amazed that anyone would take a second drink of the water. I got smart this time and just held the glass to my lips and shot a glance at Vic, who covered her mouth for multiple reasons.

She turned her head. “Help!”

Duane turned to look at her. “What?”

I gratefully placed the glass back into Duane’s hands and stepped forward, leaning an ear against the basement door. “I’m sure I heard it that time.” I twisted the knob as Duane’s voice called out from behind me. “That door’s locked, there’s nobody . . .”

The door swung open, revealing a stairwell that turned at a landing below and continued to the left. There was a light switch to the right, just inside the doorway, and I flipped it on. The full force of heat and humidity wafted up from the basement as I took the first step down. “Duane, it sounds like there’s somebody in trouble down here, so I’m going to have a look, okay?”

He moved to the doorway behind me, edging a little in front of Vic. “Nunh-uh, there’s nobody down there.”

I raised a hand at his protests. “Vic, did you hear something?”

“Maybe . . .” She tromped down the stairs behind me and whispered, “What’s my motivation?”

Duane called after us. “Hey, there’s nobody down there, she just yelled that.”

As I turned the corner at the landing, I looked back up at her. “What, were you going to make me drink the entire glass of water?”

She smiled the crocodile smile. “I just wanted to see if you could do it.”

There was another light switch attached to one of the basement support poles and a new, reinforced BX cable that strung on into the darkness. I put my hand on the switch as Duane joined us—it appeared the dogs wouldn’t come down the stairs.

“Hey, you can’t go down there without a warrant thing.”

I glanced back up at him. “Duane, I’ve got an emergency situtation, and you wouldn’t want me to ignore it if someone is down here and hurt, would you?”

“Well, nunh-uh, but . . .”

I flipped the switch and glanced around as I stepped onto the dirt floor. It was your usual old house basement with a low ceiling and rough-cut beams and antiquated wiring with porcelain insulators and cast iron pipes that arrived from above and disappeared below. There was an aged washer and dryer that sat in a corner, unplugged, along with an operating hot water heater and a massive, coal-driven furnace looking like a giant metal octopus with a large chute that led to an opening along the hand-stacked foundation. There was the usual junk piled against the walls along with an inordinate amount of gardening tools, supplies, and at least eight fifty-pound bags of fertilizer.

A large blue tarp was tacked to the sill above and screwed into a four-by-four resting on the floor with a number of heavy-gauge extension cords disappearing underneath. As we stood there, the air pressure from whatever was on the other side billowed the plastic back toward us.

Vic stuffed her hands in the pockets of her jacket and leaned against one of the support beams as Duane joined me, still holding the glass of putrid water.

“I don’t see any snakes, Duane.”

“They’re in the tunnel.”

I gestured with my chin toward the blue plastic. “That way?”

“Yunh-huh, but it’s caved in real bad. That’s why we’ve got the tarp over it.”

I walked to the front of the opening and held my hand to the side where warm, moist air was escaping. I looked down and saw that two large eyelet bolts were screwed into the four-by-four and then up at two large hooks where the wood could be lifted and held in place. I stooped and, even with the pain in my rear, began lifting up the wood and consequently the tarp.

Duane was at my side immediately and placed a hand on my arm. “Look, you can’t go in there, you gotta have a warrant to be . . .”

“Duane, I’ve explained the situation and if you attempt to interfere with me any more, I’m going to ask my deputy over there to restrain you—and trust me, it’s something she really likes doing.”

I threw a glance back at Vic, who lowered a boot to the floor and began moving toward us in a smooth but determined gait.

Duane threw himself aside and sat on the bags of fertilizer; he was still holding the glass. “Fine, fuck it. Just go ahead and get it over with.”

I raised the board and hooked it up as Vic joined me at the jagged opening in the basement wall where many a bandit and whoremonger had escaped the local constabulary. There were a few small indicator lamps strung out like landing lights, but that was all. The warmth and humidity hit like a wave, and we both stood there. I couldn’t see anything but thought that there must be a switch somewhere, so I raised a hand past Vic’s face and felt along the wall. It was there, and I flicked the heavy-duty toggle and watched as fluorescent lights throbbed on full with a monotone thrum.

Vic, as usual, spoke first. “Well, fuck me.”

We both leaned forward in absolute disbelief. Humidifiers and heaters ran the distance half the length of a football field with hydroponic lights cascading life-giving warmth and vitamin D onto four- foot-tall plants that grew as far as we could see. I turned my head and spoke out of the side of my mouth. “Is that what I think it is?”

She nodded and looked back to where Duane sat at the opening of what looked to be the largest subterranean marijuana crop in history.

When I got back to the office, Vic was stretched out on the reception bench asleep, wrapped in a couple of blankets with a pillow stuffed against the armrest. Dog lay beside the bench and wagged a greeting in four/four time as I sat with care next to Vic’s stocking feet—the only part of her that showed from under the gray wool.

I reached down and petted Dog, who fell over on his side next to Vic’s tactical boots and closed his eyes. It seemed like a really good idea, so I pulled my hat down over my face and leaned back against the wall.

Vic moved her feet up onto my lap, and her voice was thick with sleep. “Well, now we know why Duane told Geo that there were snakes in the tunnel.”

“Yep.” I rubbed the thick knitted socks and listened to her purr. “I locked up the cash crop, and Gina has taken command of the household. She says she didn’t know anything about Duane’s cottage industry.”

“Is she the one who works over at the Kum and Go, drives around with people tied to her bumper, and always smells like the chronic?”

“That’d be the one.”

“And you believe her?”

“Let’s just say I thought we had enough people in jail for one night, and I’ve got plenty more problems to go around. Where’s Henry?”

She pulled the blanket down, and her nose and the tarnished gold eyes appeared. “Asleep in your office.”

I exhaled and wasn’t sure if I had the energy to fill my lungs back up again. “How is the mad golfer?”

“Resting comfortably in holding cell A.”

“And the pot grower of America?”

“Holding cell B.” She adjusted, and I could see she was reaching underneath herself. “You want some more fucked-up shit?”

“Not really.”

She recovered some loose sheets of paper that she handed to me. “Too bad, ’cause it’s the only news that’s fit to print.”

I examined the pages. “What’s this?”

“The answer from NCIC on Sancho’s request for a report on the partial thumb, which came back as a negative—not enough print to work with.”

“It’s Felix Polk’s. We know that because he’s been everywhere in the county asking for it back.” I rubbed my face with one hand. “That’s another little chore I’ve got to go do.”

She wrapped the blanket tighter around the trunk of her body, emphasizing some of her more curvaceous physical attributes. “Uh-huh . . .”

I looked at her. “Now, why do I not like the sound of that?”

“Because I was bored and punched in Felix Polk and discovered he has a bench warrant with the Travis County Sheriff’s Department in Texas concerning a failure to appear on a breaking and entering charge stemming from an incident in 1963.”

“Is that all?”

She snorted. “Isn’t that enough?”

“I don’t think a more-than-forty-year-old bench warrant is going to be enough to occupy the Euskadi Avenger, especially now that we’ve got a real death on our hands.”

She laughed outright. “Yeah, well, imagine how Felix Polk is going to feel about having his past and minor transgressions revisited. And as to Geo Stewart’s death, there’s not much of a mystery to that one.”

“Maybe. Did you happen to notice that one of his shoe-laces was undone?”

The look she was giving me could’ve been defined as incredulous. “So?”

“Geo was pretty careful about that type of thing.”

She sat up. “Wait a minute, are we discussing the sartorial splendor of the man whose hair grew through his long underwear?”

“Yep, but he’s also the guy who wore both suspenders and a belt and fully laced his logging boots.”

She covered her head back up with the blanket. “Right.”

I sighed and thought about the long drive I was going to have to take up the mountain. “Is that address for Felix Polk current? I was thinking of paying him a little visit before Sancho gets to work. You want to tag along?”

She didn’t move, her head still covered. “No.”

I looked at Dog, who dropped his head back between his outstretched paws. So much for man’s best friends. I sighed and glanced down the hallway toward the two cells in back. “I don’t mean to disturb your rest, but you say Ozzie Junior is in cell A?”

“Sleeping like a lamb and snoring like a lion.”

“Well, it’s good that he’s getting some rest.”

She snuggled back down in her blankets, and I was starting to wish it were a wider bench. “Yeah, imagine how he’s going to feel when he wakes up and finds out he’s headed for the big house.”

 

 

“Are you Felix Polk?” The bandage on the man’s thumb, the registration of the Jeep Wagoneer in the drive, and the name on one of the mailboxes at the end of Caribou Creek Road were pretty good clues, but this was official business.

The wind raced over the canyon where we stood, and with the altitude I bet we were standing in negative ten degrees. Felix Polk was a tall man, almost as tall as I am and close to the same age, with a large belly but in good shape if you didn’t count the missing appendage. He had on a pair of chain-saw chaps and a hard hat with the built-in noise compressors flipped up so that he could hear me. Behind the cabin, some kind of machinery was running.

“You haven’t got my thumb with you, do you?”

I smiled at him. “Mr. Polk, that’s actually what I’d like to talk to you about.”

He nodded. “C’mon out back, and I’ll shut the log splitter down.”

I followed him around the cabin and noted the architecture. It was pretty indicative of the period when the Bighorn National Forest had had to concede a few spots of land to long-term, hundred-year leases. Some of them were coming up for renewal and were a cause of anxiety to the locals, and the ones that were built in the late forties and early fifties were recently changing hands for a reasonable amount of money because of the concerns over the state’s proclivity to cancel the leases.

This one was a handsome structure, the logs weathered to a solid gray with the old Oregon cement in between recently patched. Green asphalt shingles and wooden cased windows framed the small porch at the front, which led down a shallow slope to a pump house next to Caribou Creek.

There were stacks of firewood under every eave of the cabin, and a lean-to behind it held another eight cords at least. Evidently Felix Polk was expecting the winter to last as long as I was.

As nice as the cabin was, it was the environs that were the strong point. The house was nestled into a small box canyon with massive rock walls thrusting above the lodgepole pines. The majority of the privately owned structures in the mountains were situated in clusters along service roads or by the reservoirs such as Dull Knife, but this one was isolated with the only way in or out a dirt road that ran a winding three-quarters of a mile back to Route 16. It was just the kind of place to which you hoped to someday retire, and Felix Polk had.

“Twenty-two years at Dynamic Tool and Die; company went belly-up, but I had enough scraped together to buy this place. A truck driver who delivered a bunch of salvage equipment to us down in Austin told me about it.”

He set a cup of coffee in front of me, and I wondered if I dozed off and my nose landed in the mug, if I’d drown. There was a fire burning in the old brick fireplace, and the cabin was cozy and warm. The furnishings looked to be from the sixties, and there were built-in bookcases chocked with a lot of military history and mass-market paperbacks with titles like
Death Hunt
,
Dead Zero
,
Dead On
, and
Death Blow
; all in all, there was a lot of death on those shelves. The most disconcerting thing was the Nazi flag that hung over the fireplace. Felix Polk caught me looking at it. “My father’s; Belgium, 1944.”

“The Bulge?”

“Yeah. I think he hated the British almost as bad as the Germans. He used to love pointing out that nineteen thousand Americans died in that battle and the Brits only lost two hundred.”