Shadow Man (19 page)

Chief of police Scott Parris pulled his black-and-white over to the curb, got out, stomped around the front of the low-slung Chevrolet.

Eddie Knox returned the boss’s glare.

Piggy Slocum concentrated on a crushed Coke can in the gutter.

“Well,” Parris said, “what happened here?”

Knox set his jaw. “We saw a suspicious vehicle, ran a make on the plate. It wasn’t in the database, so I approached and asked the driver for her driver’s license. Crazy old Indian woman said she didn’t need no kinda license because she come from a ‘sovereign nation’ and—”

Parris raised his hand to silence the man. “Save the details for your written report. What I want to know is what’s all this stuff about you being run down by the vehicle?”

“When I asked for the ignition key, she run over my foot—and it hurts like seven kinds of hell.” The limping man stuck out a tire-scuffed boot for the boss’s inspection.

The chief squinted at the display. “Eddie, correct me if I am wrong. But unless I have forgotten which leg you had amputated about twelve years ago, that is your
prosthetic
foot. And I don’t see how something that’s made of pine or birch could hurt.”

“Well, you’re wrong on both counts. For one thing—” the amputee tapped his finger on the artificial limb, “this ain’t wood. It’s a high-tech fiberglass-and-carbon composite.” He eased a little more weight on the inert member, winced. “And second, there is such a thing as phantom pain.”

Parris scowled at the eccentric man. “Are you telling me that when the motorist ran over your high-tech fiberglass-and-carbon-composite foot—that it
hurt
?”

Knox looked like a very angry bulldog who wanted to bite something. Anything. “Well of course it hurt—that’s what phantom-limb pain is
for
. I can feel the ache in all five of my toes!”

Parris could feel a sharp pain in another portion of his anatomy. He tried without success to stare Knox down, then turned his attention to the other half of the team. “Slocum, I understand you came within a gnat’s whisker of going head-on with a school bus.”

Piggy shook his head. “Oh, no sir. I missed that bus by a good first down.”

The chief of police frowned so hard it hurt his face. “First
what
?”

Knox saw his opportunity and took a shot at the boss. “It’s a football term.”

Parris didn’t miss a beat. “Stay out of this, Knox.”

“Yessir.” The insolent man smirked openly.

Parris focused his attention on the chubby cop. “Officer Slocum, I am extremely grateful that you did not kill any innocent little children today.”

Piggy responded with an enthusiastic nod. “Oh, me too, sir.”

“Tell me about your unit.”

The cop pointed in an easterly direction. “It’s out yonder in a field. I guess it’s pretty well bunged up.” It was Piggy Slocum’s nature to look on the bright side. “But it had about ninety-six thousand on it.” He fixed the little porcine eyes on his boss. “I’d sure like to have me a four-wheel-drive vehicle for off-road patrolling. You think maybe the town council would buy me one a them Hummers?”

To Officer Knox’s delight, the chief of police was grinding his teeth. “Slocum, you have just had a traumatic experience. It might have affected your brain in some way that medical science could not even imagine. So I don’t believe you’re quite ready for a Hummer. Before we put you in any kind of unit again, I think maybe you should have a nice, long rest. Six weeks, at least.”

The chubby man grinned. “Like a vacation?”

Parris nodded. “Without pay.”

Disappointment fairly dripped off Piggy’s face. “No pay—but where could I go without any money for airplane tickets and hotels and whatnot?”

The chief of police was sorely tempted to tell him precisely where he could go.

Eddie Knox was painfully aware that while they were standing there, jawing with the chief, the criminals had not yet been apprehended. He cleared his throat. “Them old women was headed east toward the mountains, and couldn’t have got very far. If we get a move on, we oughta be able to nab ’em.”

“We will not nab ’em now or at any time in the foreseeable future.” Parris smiled coldly at the amputee.

Knox started to ask why, realized that was just what the boss wanted.

Undeterred, Parris responded to the unasked question. “Because I don’t want to find them. Because if I did find them, I’d probably discover that you’d scared hell out of a couple of elderly nuns who had stopped in our fair city for a brief moment of prayer. And that they were on their way back to oversee a leper colony somewhere south of the border, where they are venerated as living saints. And because, in the interest of protecting other innocent citizens from experiencing your peculiar brand of law enforcement, they might be willing to testify at your respective trials. Not that I would mind, except for the embarrassment that kind of publicity would bring to the department.”

“Them wasn’t no nuns,” Knox mumbled. “One was an old Indian woman, the other was Anglo. And they was haulin’ around the ugliest hound dog I have ever seen.”

“They had an ugly dog in the car?” Parris threw his hands in the air. “Well that puts an altogether different light on the matter. You should’ve shot the unsightly animal right on the spot, cuffed the old ladies and slapped them around some till they come to their senses and agreed to purchase a toy poodle. Or a Yorkie or a Pek’.”

Unmoved by this verbal assault, Eddie Knox played his hole card. “The Anglo woman, she was a dope fiend.”

Parris’s head started to swim. “A dope fiend? And how did you ascertain that, Officer Knox?”

Knox started to tell the boss about the needle the doper had pushed into her arm.
But he won’t believe me
. “Ah, forget it.”

The boss looked up at an empty sky. “I’d sure like to forget it. I’d like to go back to the office and pretend none of this ever happened. In fact, I’d like to go home and go to bed and pretend this whole
day
never happened. But I’ve got a job to do. And along the line of which, hear this—as of right now, you two are on suspension until a department inquiry determines whether or not to impose disciplinary action!” He turned on his heel and left.

They watched him go.

Piggy muttered under his breath: “Eddie, I think he’s really,
really
mad at us this time. I bet he’s gonna fire our butts.”

Eddie Knox put his arm around his partner’s shoulders. “Ah, don’t worry, Pig. Sure, the fat’s in the fire right now, but once all the facts come out, we’ll be heroes. Mark my words—in a couple a weeks, I’ll be promoted to sergeant. And you—why, you’ll be toolin’ around town in a black-and-white Hummer big as a Abrams Main Battle Tank.”

Slocum’s pudgy face grinned all over. “You really think so?”

Knox sighed.
This man is dumber than a germ.

Halfway back to the station, the Granite Creek chief of police stopped at a red light. Unknown to the conscious portion of his mind, the Sub-basement Subliminal Department had been putting the bits and pieces together. Organizing. Calculating. Correlating. Now, the finished product was forwarded upstairs.

Old white woman.

Old black Oldsmobile.

License plate that’s not in the data bank.

Old Indian woman who claims she doesn’t need a driver’s license.

Old Indian woman who runs over a cop’s foot.

Ugliest hound Knox has ever seen.

The light turned green.

Oblivious to the Go signal, he stared straight ahead.
Surely
not.

There were four sedans, two pickups, and a UPS van lined up behind the chief’s unit. Suspecting that this was some kind of sly police trickery, not one driver blew a horn at the stationary black-and-white.

GCPD’s top cop shook his head.
It just couldn’t be.

But of course, it could.

Parris made a tight U-turn.

The old Olds rolled on down the road.

What a morning. Daisy Perika had learned to drive a car—and she had dodged that pushy town cop. The tribal elder was highly pleased with herself.

Sidewinder, always game for a ride, had his paws draped over the front seat. Tongue lolling out of his toothy mouth, he drooled happily, stared this way and that, all the while making the occasional canine whine, constantly emitting a distinctly doggish odor. In his field of endeavor, he was a high achiever.

Soaked to the bone in anxiety, Louise-Marie LaForte kept peppering her chauffeur with questions, to which the Ute woman provided only such responses as she thought necessary to keep the owner of the vehicle off balance.

“Back there in town,” Louise Marie chirped, “what did that policeman want?”

“He wanted to know who owned this car.”

Louise-Marie’s pink skin blanched to a chalky gray. “But whatever for?”

Daisy squinted at the horizon, wondered how far it was to Garcia’s Crossing. “That blue-suit said he wanted to put a big fine on the owner—for having a Mexican license on her bumper.”

“Well, how ridiculous—that is a perfectly lovely plate!” Louise-Marie aimed the unpatched eye at the driver. “What did you tell him?”

“I told him this old rust bucket wasn’t mine.” The speedometer needle jittered at thirty-five. She let up on the gas. “And when he said he wasn’t buying none of that, I told him to check with the rightful owner. He asked me who that unfortunate soul might be, so I gave him your name. He wanted to know where you live, and I told him that too.”

“Daisy! How could you
do
such a thing—” She noticed the Ute woman’s mischievous smile. “Oh, you’re teasing me.” A hopeful look. “Aren’t you?”

“I expect Officer Fuzz’ll be waiting for you when you get home. If you don’t have the greenback dollars to pay the bribe, they’ll probably chunk you into the jailhouse with the other outlaws.” She shot the one-eyed woman a stern look. “But don’t expect me to come and bail you out. Only income I have is my tribal allotment and Social Security.” She returned her gaze to the highway in front of the hood, cringed as a big bread truck zoomed by. “That and a few dollars I make from doing a cure now and then. And selling my homemade medicines.”

“Well, I don’t believe you told that policeman my name. In fact, I don’t believe a single word you’re saying.” Louise-Marie was of the firm opinion that if you
didn’t believe
a thing hard enough, why, the thing
just wasn’t so.

Daisy chuckled. “I bet you’ll believe it when they haul this old rattletrap away to the graveyard for dead cars. And you end up in the jug with a bunch of wild-eyed criminals.”

I just won’t pay her the least bit of attention.
Louise-Marie turned her bleary eye toward the vistas ahead. To the east, through a faintly bluish mist, mountains rose up to touch the clouds. There were rolling, rocky hills off to the right, a small stream paralleling the road on the left. “Where are we going?”

I guess I can tell her that much.
“Garcia’s Crossing.”

“I never heard of such a place.” Feeling a sudden surge of “nerves,” the French-Canadian woman began to pat a vein-lined hand on her knee. “Why are we going there?”

“To find somebody.”
Here comes another big truck. I wonder why they have to drive so fast?
Daisy pulled to the right, edging onto the bumpy shoulder.

“Oh!” Louise-Marie grabbed at the dashboard. “I don’t know if I should’ve let you drive.” She breathed a sigh of relief when all four wheels were back on the blacktop. “Who is this somebody we’re hoping to find?”

“A young white woman.”

“Why do we want to find her?”

“Because,” Daisy said with logic that did not invite dispute, “she is missing.”
And because I’d like to teach that big jug-head nephew of mine a thing or two. Like how I can find somebody that he can’t. Which proves that I’m a whole lot smarter than he thinks I am. Even smarter than he thinks he is, which is quite a lot and then some.

During this interval, Louise-Marie had been thinking. “Missing from where?”

The driver was about to respond with a tart retort, when she saw it. Daisy pointed with a lift of her chin. “Look—up the road.”

Her passenger looked. “I don’t see nothing.”

“That’s because you’re blind in one eye and can’t see a mountain out of the other.” She took one hand off the wheel long enough to point straight ahead. “On the right. That’s St. Cuthbert’s.”

Louise-Marie leaned forward. “A church?”

“No, a combination pool hall and bowling alley.”

They were now within a hundred yards of the structure. Louise-Marie was beginning to make out the architectural features. “Why would a pool hall and bowling alley have a steeple with a cross on top?”

Daisy sighed. “Because it’s a church, potato head!”

Louise-Marie was becoming dreadfully confused. “But you said—”

“Don’t pay no attention to what I said.”

The ancient sign they passed—peppered with rusty bullet holes—informed them that they were entering Garcia’s Crossing, population 99.

Daisy grinned.
Ninety of ’em must be away on business.
She could see only one residence close to St. Cuthbert’s—a brown stucco house behind the church.
That should be the rectory.
But would Pansy Blinkoe be staying there? The more she thought about it, the more sense it made. Especially if Alonzo and Prudence were illegals. It was not uncommon for kindly priests to give shelter to people who had no other place to go.

The Ute woman saw another sign. This one was considerably larger, and on the left side, directly across the road from St. Cuthbert’s. It read:
POKEY JOE’S GENERAL STORE
.

The two-story building behind the sign was unpainted clapboard, leaning tentatively as if on the verge of slipping away to a better site. Three old-fashioned Texaco pumps were lined up out front. Daisy slowed until she spotted the entrance to the establishment. What the driver did
not
spot was the motorcycle in the oncoming lane, roaring down the road at seventy-six miles per hour. She was also blissfully unaware of the big Dodge pickup coming up fast from behind. It was for this reason that she made the left turn with considerable confidence.

To avoid the Olds, the guy on the Harley swerved into the oncoming lane, missed the pickup by a whisker, bounced along the shoulder, barely avoided being pitched into the ditch. The motorcyclist cursed the black Oldsmobile, the white Dodge truck, his dark karma, the universe, and every malignant atom in it.

The pickup driver cursed the black Oldsmobile, the speeding motorcyclist, plus all Democrats and Republicans. The registered Independent did not care whether or not the other drivers were attached to the major political parties; bad-mouthing the Jackasses and Elephants was merely force of habit, and highly satisfying.

Louise-Marie had seen something whoosh by. Something black and blurry. Then a white something, var-oooming in the other direction. “What was that?”

Having knocked a galvanized water can aside, Daisy was braking to a sliding stop on the graveled surface. “What was what?”

“I think somebody almost hit us.”

“I’m not surprised. Most of these dumbos go way too fast and don’t pay no attention to us careful drivers. I don’t think half of ’em know
how
to drive a car.” Daisy eyed the gearshift. “Tell me again, what do I do with this gizmo when I want to stop?”

“Put it in P.”

“Oh. Right.” She did this. “How do I shut the motor down?”

Louise-Marie pointed to a chrome-plated slot under the gear shift. “You just turn that doodad to Off. Then give me the key.”

Daisy fumbled with the ignition switch until the engine stuttered to a stop, passed the key to Louise-Marie. It was a great relief to be motionless again. She sat there for a delightful moment, enjoying the immobility. The stillness. The quiet. It was not to last.

“My head is starting to pound, and I can see little wavy lines in front of my eye.” Louise-Marie took a deep breath, moaned. “I think my sugar’s getting too
low
. I need to get me something to eat.”

“They should have some food in this big store.” Daisy managed to get her stiff legs out of the car. After retrieving her walking stick from the rear, she heard a rumbling sound, a crunch of tires on the gravel. She turned to see a young man on a motorcycle. He was filthy with road dust, had hair like a tangled mop, wore black leather and a malicious scowl.

Stringy-Hair was glaring at her. “You the old biddy who run me off the road?”

All these young people nowadays look so angry all the time. Like they never learned no manners.
“Don’t you talk to me like that,” she snapped. “And why don’t you take a bath and get a job!”

He said something that sounded like
rich
or
itch
but was neither. Something else sounded like
arrrgh
and was.

“Mess with me,” Daisy raised her sturdy oak staff like the club it was, “I’ll whack you upside of your ugly gourd head. And while you’re laid out flat, I’ll sic Sidewinder on you—he’ll chew all the meat off your bones!”

Hearing his name mentioned, the hound felt summoned. He lurched out of the car to confront the stranger. Instantly, the back of his neck bristled.
“Arrrgh,”
Sidewinder said to Stringy-Hair.

Having recently uttered the same expletive, the motorcyclist understood. He growled, raised a filthy finger at the dog. Having had the final eloquent word, he revved the Harley engine to a roar that rattled the old women’s bones, sped away victorious—kicking gravel in a magnificent arc.

Louise-Marie was perplexed by life in general and by this encounter in particular. “Who was that?”

“Bugs-on-His-Teeth,” the Ute woman replied. She shook her stick at the departing villain.

It is just amazing how Daisy seems to know everybody and everything. But what a strange name.
“What did Mr. Bugs-Teeth want?”

“To strangle us and steal our purses, I expect.” Daisy sighed at the injustice of it all. “That’s why I don’t like to travel these days. A civilized person is likely meet up with really nasty people. Tramps and savages and the like.”

With the hound at their heels, the women went into the store. The inside was filled with dust and twilight. And every sort of merchandise imaginable. But not a human being in sight.

Until a tall, stout woman descended the stairs. The proprietor was outfitted in faded overalls and heavy men’s boots. Girlish black bangs made a perfectly straight line above the double arches of painted-on eyebrows. She paused to unfasten a chain that stretched across the bottom step. The brass links supported a hand-painted sign which warned customers that the space upstairs was private living quarters—keep out. She gave the trio a stern, uncompromising look. “I’m sorry, but we have strict rules ’bout what kinda creatures can come into the store.”

“Oh, it’s all right,” Daisy said with a quick glance at Sidewinder, another at her patch-eyed companion. “He’s her Seeing Eye hound.”

Pokey Joe glowered at Daisy. “I was speaking to the
dog.
”