Plains Crazy (27 page)

Hailey wasn't showing any concern about the gloves or the mask. She had her head out the window near Mad Dog's ear, devouring the breeze he was turning into a gale.

“What are you doing with that stuff anyway?” Englishman asked, finally allowing himself to pay attention to what was going on in the back seat.

“I keep it with me in case she gets hurt,” Mad Dog replied. “Wolves, they won't put up with much, even from people they love.”

Mad Dog glanced in the rearview mirror and saw Parker shaking her head. “I don't expect you to have to use those,” he told her. “But keep your eyes open. If you think we're going to hit something, grab her.”

“You're kidding.” Parker had to speak up now, over the growing noise of the wind buffeting through the open windows and the howl of the engine as Mad Dog redlined it for each gear change. Third now, three to go.

“Just for a second,” Mad Dog said. “Probably won't matter. At the speed we'll be going, none of us are likely to survive. But I'll feel better about opening this thing up if you'll try to protect her.”

“Oh sure then, why not,” Parker shouted.

Mad Dog went into fourth and started easing the windows up. Slow, so Hailey had time to pull her head in. He didn't want her catching a stray grasshopper at more than a hundred. They'd be able to hear each other, too, and the Mini Cooper could go a little faster if he smoothed out its profile.

“How fast will this thing go?” Englishman asked.

“They come from the factory with an electronic chip that shuts them down a little over 130,” Mad Dog told him. Fifth gear now, and already some serious speed. He turned on the flashers and the headlights. People could see them a little sooner that way and, fortunately, in central Kansas, there would be no sudden curves or hills or valleys to mask their approach.

“I had no idea something this size could go that fast.”

“Faster, maybe,” Mad Dog told him. “First thing I did after I got it broken in was find a shop with a computer geek who could bypass the chip.”

Mad Dog saw his brother glance at the center-dash-mounted speedometer. It was graded all the way to 150. Conservative, Mad Dog thought.

***

Doc parked beside the stuffed buffalo. A young man in a pair of shorts and hiking boots came to meet him.

“Doctor Jones,” the man said, extending a hand. “I'm afraid Mr. Davis is gone. And Michael's family's, too, to make arrangements.”

Doc accepted the hand and gave it the requisite brief, firm shake. Kansas men didn't let other men hold their hands longer than necessary. He struggled to remember this one's name. He was an assistant producer, the man who'd put such an effort into resurrecting the boy that morning—the one who'd confused the issue because his vigorous CPR pumped all the blood out of the body.

“Actually,” Doc explained, “I'm not here about Michael.”

The man raised his eyebrows. “No?”

Sean. Doc remembered, because the man's name was Irish, like Michael's. “Sean, I've got an unidentified body over at the morgue. I wondered if you were missing any crew members.”

Sean shrugged. “Who knows. Since this morning, people have been drifting in and out. Not that I blame them. This production's over.”

“Small community like ours,” Doc said, “we don't get unidentified bodies much. When we do, someone usually misses them right away. That hasn't happened, so I figure if we got a bunch of strangers out here in this pasture, my body's most likely one of them.”

“What's this body look like? You got a picture?”

“Well…” Doc had pictures, but none of them were pleasant to look at or likely to be helpful. “Kid's face was pretty well ruined when she got thrown from her motorcycle.”

Sean got a sad look on his face. “A blond girl, nineteen, pretty? I guess you might not be able to tell whether she's pretty anymore. She'd be trim with a good figure—about five six and one twenty with curly blond hair.”

“That all fits,” Doc acknowledged. “Is there anything else that might help me make this a positive ID? Scars, birthmarks, stuff like that?”

“Nothing I know of,” he said. “Except she rides a motorcycle. She's the only woman on our crew with one. And…”

It was Doc's turn to make his eyebrows into question marks.

“She might have been high on something.”

Doc nodded. “I found needle tracks on her arm. That sound right?”

“I'm afraid it does.”

“Surprises me,” Doc said, “that you'd keep someone on your crew who was using drugs.”

“Our director, Brad Davis, he's her father. She only answered to him.”

That caught Doc by surprise. “Somebody's got to inform him,” Doc said. “And I need her name for my records.”

“Davis may not be easy to reach,” Sean said. “I just tried and he's not answering his cell. But if you need to do the next of kin thing, I hear her grandmother's in town for some kind of reunion.”

“What's her name?” Doc prompted again.

“Jackie. That's the girl's name. Her grandmother is a former resident named Jorgenson.”

Two surprises in a row and this one a lot bigger than the first.

Sean looked like he was considering something for a moment, then he reached out and took Doc's arm. “There's something I'd like you to look at, Doctor, if you don't mind.”

“What's that?”

Sean led him toward the entrance to a Greyhound-sized RV. “There've been some weird things happening around here,” he said, opening the door and ushering Doc into an opulent interior. “Not just Michael. Jackie and Mr. Davis, they've been coming and going and there's been this other guy here, sometimes late at night. Last night for instance.”

“I don't understand.” Sean led Doc past a living room and a kitchen and down a hall.

“That other guy, I think he's some kind of official with the county. Rumors say some bombs went off in Buffalo Springs today.”

“Three of them,” Doc said, “but what's that got to do with…”

Sean opened a door on a small wood-paneled office that made up in luxury what it lacked in size. “Mr. Davis, he left in such a hurry, he didn't tell me what to do about returning this vehicle. So I was looking for the registration or something when I found this. We've got no business having it.” He pointed at an empty container lying on the carpet between a cherry-wood desk and a leather recliner.

Doc bent over and tried to make out what it was. There was printing on the side. The first line he deciphered read, “TNT equivalence: 118%.”

***

Whenever something interesting happened, Mrs. Kraus got stuck holding down the fort in the sheriff's office. Minutes after Englishman and Parker left the building, Supervisors Wynn and Finfrock did the same. She had to show Craig Finfrock that the sheriff's handcuffs could be opened by anything you could fit in the keyhole. Then the supervisors ran out and jumped in the chairman's Cadillac and hightailed it toward the explosion and left Mrs. Kraus behind, alone.

On the bright side, phone calls flooded the office and the rumor mill kept her updated on everything. The blast had been half a mile east of town. Nothing more important than a few weeds and Osage orange trees, and a big hunk of highway, had been seriously damaged. There were lots of broken windows, especially at the school and on the east side. A couple of people had minor cuts as a result, but nothing more. When the sheriff reported he and Parker were making a high-speed dash to Wichita in Mad Dog's Mini, she filled him in, then made the calls he needed. Sheriff's offices in the counties they would pass through promised not to impede the speeding Cooper.

Then it got quiet in the office. There were no more explosions or other catastrophes, so the phone stopped ringing. Mrs. Kraus began to get bored. That was why she decided to search Supervisor Haines' office. What else did she have to do? She took along her Glock, not that she expected trouble. All the trouble she knew of had left the county and was somewhere on the road ahead of the sheriff. Still, you never knew.

The door to Haines' office was open. He had departed in a hurry, through a window in the sheriff's office just ahead of that exploding grenade. She didn't think he'd left behind anything incriminating. On the other hand, he might have thought there wouldn't be anything there to investigate, not even a standing building.

The room looked neat enough, though the wallpaper was faded and stained from leaks in the roof bad enough to seep clear through the floor above. But for a phone, a blotter, and a pen set, his desktop was empty. She went through his desk drawers. None contained anything more interesting than the files and memos she expected. Except one file in the bottom drawer on the right.

It was filled with fake ID cards. They had Haines' pictures on them, but other people's names—Chairman Wynn's and Supervisor Finfrock's, and even a couple of Englishman's deputies. And there was another one that hadn't come out right. The county seal and some of the printing was smudged, like the thing had been touched before it dried. It looked like it said sheriff on it, only she wasn't quite sure. She needed her magnifying glass to make it out. She carried it back to her office. She was still trying to read it as she went around the counter, angling it to catch the light from the windows in the west wall. She wasn't watching where she was going and she stepped on a pencil that had been knocked to the floor earlier, along with the hand grenade. It caused her to lose her balance and go over sideways into a filing cabinet.

“Damn, barked my shin good that time,” she said, sitting on the floor amidst the glass shards from the broken window, massaging her injured leg. She punched the offending file just hard enough to repay it for her seeping wound without creating fresh ones on her knuckles.

That was when she noticed the fax machine was no longer plugged in. The fax sat atop that file cabinet. Its power cord was still attached, but the phone line wasn't. It lay on the floor beside her. Mrs. Kraus wondered when that had happened. She hadn't thought she'd touched the fax or the cord as she fell. She reached up to restore the connection and discovered a phone line was already plugged in there. Curious.

She cautiously got on her hands and knees and peered around behind the cabinet. It was just a short phone line coming out of the back of the fax machine. It led to a gizmo, to which the loose wire she'd found apparently needed to be plugged.

These newfangled contraptions had to go and be so complicated. Why on earth did the fax need a phone line to pass through a funny-looking box with some wires leading to…What was that back there? She brushed some glass aside and sat on the linoleum and stretched to reach behind the cabinet so she could pull the wires and see what they were connected to. Sweet Jesus, they went to what she thought was a blasting cap, stuffed into a roll of dough-like material and duct taped to a pint of lighter fluid.

Haines must have hooked this up when he went through the faxes just before the incident with the grenade. Either he hadn't made a good connection or someone had tripped on it and pulled it loose while they were trying to save themselves. Otherwise, she thought, it would have exploded when the next call came in on the fax line. And with the lighter fluid as an incendiary device, turned her into a crispy critter in a matter of seconds.

Mrs. Kraus felt herself go all wobbly. She would have had to sit down if she wasn't already doing so. This was the second time today she'd come whisker-close to being killed by one of Jud Haines' weapons of terror. That was scary.

A phone rang. Since it didn't trigger an explosion, she reached up and answered it.

“Just a second, Doc,” she said.

A stray thought nagged her memory and she had to concentrate to snag it. When she did, it raised the hair on the back of her neck. She'd remembered one of her mother's favorite sayings. Third time's a charm.

***

Pull over!”

Mad Dog hit the brakes and guided the Mini Cooper to the side of the road. Before he could ask why, his brother had thrown the door open and vaulted across the ditch. That was when Mad Dog noticed the truck among the evergreens, and the way the ditch had been torn up as the truck found its way there. He and Hailey tumbled out as well while Parker tried to figure out how to move the seats so she could do the same.

“They're not here and there's no blood,” Englishman said, looking worried all the same.

“Who…” and then Mad Dog realized that the truck with the crumpled roof was Englishman's, the one the Heathers had been in when they left Buffalo Springs after encountering that couple in the Nissan. Mad Dog and his brother and Parker had been updating each other and comparing notes on the road.

“Somebody must have picked them up,” Englishman said, worrying it over in his mind. “But they should have called to let me know this happened before it got reported to the office. They ought to know how much I'd worry, under the circumstances.”

He came back across the ditch, stuck his head in the Cooper, and asked Parker to call the office. “They wouldn't be able to get me on my cell,” he reasoned. “Not since the battery ran out. Maybe Mrs. Kraus has heard from them.”

Parker's phone began to ring before she could fumble it off her belt with the gauntlets on. She punched a button and told it, “Parker.”

Mad Dog looked around, trying to picture how the accident had happened and what might have become of his nieces. Hailey was standing just a few feet ahead of the Cooper, front leg lifted, nose and tail extended. She looked like a bird dog pointing a covey of quail.

“Is that Mrs. Kraus?” Englishman wanted to know.

Parker told him it was, and handed over the phone.

Mad Dog had never seen Hailey do anything like that before. “Whatcha got, babe?” He couldn't see anything where she was pointing, just a footprint on a patch of bare dirt at the edge of the pavement. He bent and looked at it closer. The print had an unusual pattern. He'd never seen one like it before, not until about an hour ago over where they were filming
This Old Teepee
.