Server Down Read online

Billy Macklin was maybe twenty-one, now, and the son of a member of the Benteen County Board of Supervisors. And the sheriff thought Billy had more likely been parked with Dana Miller somewhere nearby. Though sex in parked cars was the one recreational activity young people in Benteen County could enjoy consistently—this time of the year, with the motor running to supply heat as well as a quick getaway in case someone happened to come along—the sheriff doubted Billy and Dana had been in each other’s pants. Not that he thought they hadn’t experimented together with their sexuality. They were just odd kids, both of them. Geniuses, for whom all the world seemed to be an ongoing experiment. If Billy and Dana were parked near Mad Dog’s place when it blew up, they were more likely dissecting a fresh road kill than trying out positions recommended by the Kama Sutra for back seats. Whatever, he was lucky to have a witness of any sort. There wasn’t much traffic on these back roads late at night. For that matter, there wasn’t much traffic anytime, with the county’s population in steady decline.

  “Billy says there weren’t any flames before the explosion. Says the house was lit up, normal looking. And then it just erupted like it was hit by a cruise missile. He saw someone, back lit, running away. Someone who jumped in a pickup and sped off without lights. You don’t suppose that could have been Mad Dog?”

  The sheriff wanted to think so, but if it had been his brother the sheriff would have heard from him by now. And his brother didn’t have a pickup.

  “Not likely,” the sheriff said. “And I’ve tried calling his cell. Goes right to his messages. I’ve left several.”

  The chief hung his head. “Damn! I am so sorry, Sheriff.”

  The guys fighting the garage door fire finally managed to extinguish it. One of them took an ax to what remained. The sheriff thought about telling him it wouldn’t be locked, but it wasn’t like the man was damaging anything that wasn’t already ruined. Besides, the guy had probably been looking forward to chopping his way into something from the moment they got the call.

  “Billy still here?” the sheriff asked.

  “Nah. He’s gone on home. Other than telling us what he saw, wasn’t nothing he could do to help.”

  “Billy have any idea what kind of truck it was?” the sheriff asked.

  “No, sir. Says him and Dana was scared and ducked down when it went by and didn’t get a good look.”

  What were Billy and Dana doing out here at this hour? That was just one of many questions the sheriff would ask them when he got the chance.

  “Hey Chief! Sheriff!” It was the guy with the ax, hollering across the ruin that was Mad Dog’s yard. “The garage is empty. Mad Dog’s Mini Cooper isn’t in here.”

  ***

  Mad Dog hadn’t the foggiest idea what to do next. He shouldn’t have run. But Hailey had led the way and he’d had bad feelings about staying. Still had them about going back, even worse now.

  He aimed the Mini down the first major street he found and headed east, away from the freeway. Getting out of town wouldn’t work. Sooner or later, he was going to have to turn himself in to law enforcement. Getting caught on the interstate, they’d think he was trying to get away from Tucson. It would make him look even guiltier than…well, it was hard to imagine how much guiltier he could look than he already did.

  He came to an intersection with a major thoroughfare and turned south. It wasn’t like he knew where he was going. He’d been through Tucson a couple of times on his way to visit the Pacific Ocean. He hadn’t stopped, except for gas and a meal and, once, to spend the night in a motel. Or had that been Benson or Gila Bend? He couldn’t remember.

  What he’d seen of the city so far had a surprisingly dim and industrial feel to it. Of the desert, there was no sign—except there were almost no patches of grass and damn few trees. In fact, but for a little fitful post-midnight traffic, there seemed to be hardly any living things in Tucson.

  Another intersection, another turn. Back west, this time. Was his subconscious taking him back to the scene of the crime? Telling him to turn himself in now? No. What he wanted was some private place to consider what had happened and what to do about it. He needed to commune with the spirit world. But he didn’t have his medicine pouch anymore. And he hadn’t packed the rest of his Cheyenne paraphernalia. Not that he actually had to have it, but painting himself, putting on his breechcloth and the headband with the raven feather—it helped him focus on who and what he was. It helped him feel like a Cheyenne shaman, even if the rest of the world thought it was all a bunch of nonsense.

  This time the street ended, offering him the choice of north or south. North was wider, brighter, so he went that way even though it would take him back toward Pascua Village. Not a good idea. The police thought he’d killed one of their own. That might lead to a shoot-first-and-ask-later response from any law enforcement agency. In fact, that very concern was why he’d followed Hailey when she ran. And the guy who’d done it, he’d seemed to know exactly what to say and when to say it to deflect the guilt toward Mad Dog. Plus, the guy actually looked Indian. What if Mad Dog’s accuser was some well-known local, respected, and believed by the community to be absolutely incapable of killing an officer? And why had the man killed? Mad Dog was going to need contrary theories to that of himself as prime suspect. Right now he didn’t have any, and that was why taking time out to commune with the spirits seemed like a good idea.

  Then he saw the shop and realized why he’d been driving in circles.

  The place was still open. And it would probably stock some of the stuff he needed to make himself feel Indian. He slipped the Mini over into the left lane, made a U-turn, and went back and parked in the vacant lot next to the building. A four-wheel-drive pickup, a Harley, and a battered old Chevy were already parked there.

  Hailey stayed in the car when he got out so he didn’t worry about leaving the windows down and the doors unlocked, even though this didn’t strike him as a great neighborhood. Mostly old motels, some of them the by-the-hour variety. And the business he was going to—well, you wouldn’t find what he was looking for in a Circle-K.

  Mad Dog pulled the door open. There was a man perusing the magazine racks against one wall. Loud music with a heavy beat boomed from a back room masked by curtains under a sign that said LIVE NUDE GIRLS, 24-7!!! Another guy sat at a counter looking bored.

  “What’ll it be?” the counter guy asked.

  “What have you got in the way of body paint and breechcloths?” Mad Dog smiled, trying not to look as kinky as the question sounded.

  ***

  Excuse me,” Heather said to the stretched blanket that hid the corpse. “Did I hear right? Did you say Mad Dog?”

  The man who stood up from behind the blanket was not much taller than Heather. His skin and hair and eyes were very dark and he had cheek bones to die for. He was wearing a uniform that proclaimed him as another Sewa tribal policeman, like the man who’d passed them through the gate.

  “Why do you ask?” He stepped around the blanket. He was older than she’d thought at first and there were a couple of bars on his shoulders.

  She introduced herself and showed him her Benteen County departmental ID. “My uncle’s name is Mad Dog. That’s why I wondered.”

  The man studied her identity card. “He’s what, a biker or something?”

  “Actually, he’s Cheyenne. Me too, partly, though the bloodline gets pretty thin by my generation.”

  The man nodded, though he didn’t look convinced. Heather couldn’t blame him. He was so clearly Native American while she looked lily white.

  “Your uncle, he was here with you tonight?”

  “Ah, no actually. In fact, he’s still in Kansas. Or I think he is. But the officer at the gate, he asked us if we’d seen a big bald man and that could be him.”

  “Describe your uncle for me.”

  Heather was feeling increasingly uncomfortable. It couldn’t be Uncle Mad Dog, not unless he’d gotten her email and hopped in his car first thing this morning and driven stra
ight through. She supposed that was possible. But her uncle was a pacifist and an opponent of capital punishment. There was no way he would have killed anyone.

  “Well, he’s about six-two, maybe two-fifty. Middle-aged, but fit. He doesn’t look Cheyenne. He’s fair skinned like me. Oh, and the bald isn’t from hair loss. He shaves his head every day.”

  The man nodded. “He carry a knife?”

  “Yeah. Pretty much everybody back home has a pocket knife.”

  “Describe it.”

  Heather dug into her Levis and pulled out a small Swiss Army knife. It had an inch-and-a-half blade, a screw driver of similar size, a tooth pick, and a set of tweezers. “Just like this, only his is red, not pink. He gave my sister and me a pair of these when we were still teens because we were always borrowing his.”

  “How about his chrome-handled switch-blade?” the officer said.

  “No,” Heather said. “He doesn’t own a switchblade. He wouldn’t because they’re illegal and he wouldn’t want to embarrass his brother. My dad’s the sheriff.”

  “Ah,” the man nodded, as if that explained why a kid like her was carrying a badge.

  “It couldn’t be him,” Ms. Jardine said.

  “And next,” the cop said, “I suppose you’re going to tell me your uncle doesn’t have some kind of huge beast of a dog that follows him around, or drive a red Mini Cooper with Kansas plates?”

  Heather’s jaw dropped, but she countered the best she could. “Well, he doesn’t have a dog. She’s a wolf.”

  ***

  Bits of Mad Dog’s house still burned. The fire crew had doused most of them leaving seared patches of lawn that only produced smoke instead of flame.

  “Could it have been a gas explosion?” the sheriff asked. What else might cause a house to explode, unless his brother was conducting some sort of strange chemical experiments?

  “Nope,” the fire chief said. “Checked the propane tank the moment we got here to turn it off so’s it wouldn’t feed the fire. Thing was already off.”

  “That’s right,” English remembered. “Mad Dog was trying to get through the winter without turning on his gas. Said he’d huddle up near his Franklin stove with Hailey and not contribute to our nation’s policy of wasting irreplaceable energy resources.”

  The chief shook his head. Everybody knew Mad Dog was peculiar, but he had a way of making folks feel guilty for not making similar lifestyle choices. “Not many things will cause a house to blow up like that. Mad Dog don’t strike me as the type, though I’ve heard him say he tried most every drug, back in the day. Any chance he might have tried to brew up some methamphetamines?”

  The sheriff smiled. Mad Dog had done it all, from grass to LSD to opiates. But that was a long time ago and his brother had turned into one of the cleanest living people you could meet. If peyote was explosive, maybe, since peyote was considered a holy sacrament by some Native American churches. But even that would surprise the sheriff. Mad Dog didn’t need substances to get high. Life got him high. Being Cheyenne got him high. Trying to be a shaman got him higher still.

  “No,” the sheriff said. “Mad Dog might do a lot of crazy things. Turning his house into a meth lab isn’t one of them.”

  The sheriff and the fire chief were wandering about the yard, examining small smoldering clumps that had once been Mad Dog’s house or belongings. The sheriff was having a tough go of it because, though it was below freezing again, it was barely so, and the water the fire crew had been spraying was turning into gelatinous mud. Maneuvering his walker across a surface that swallowed its legs instead of supporting them was a problem.

  “Hey, Sheriff!” The voice came from over near the road where one of the volunteers had parked his old Dodge pickup. “I think you best come look at this.”

  The fire chief helped the sheriff extricate the walker from a particularly swampy section and get back onto the hard-packed surface of the driveway, then the two of them headed for the road and the man who’d summoned him.

  “What is it?” The moon was nearly full and the sheriff could see that the man was standing next to something dangling from the barbed wire fence that kept Mad Dog’s buffalo herd from grazing the freshly sprouted wheat across the way.

  “I’m not sure,” the man said. “Looks like some big old sawed-off shotgun. There’s a webbed sling that appears to have got tangled up in the fence here, like someone in a hurry climbed out of the pasture and dropped this and then couldn’t pull it free and didn’t feel like hanging around to get it loose.”

  The sheriff considered the ditch and decided against trying to wade across it. “You got a flashlight you can shine on it?”

  The man did and the sheriff recognized it right away. It was a breach-loading M79 grenade launcher. Just like the ones troops were still carrying when he earned a Purple Heart in Southeast Asia.

  ***

  A marked Tucson Police Department unit pulled up near the gate while the Sewa officer continued to question Heather and Ms. Jardine. The Tucson officers climbed out of their squad car and the Sewa captain sent one of his men to meet them. Heather picked up just enough of the conversation to understand they were arguing about jurisdiction. When an unmarked car glided in and deposited a couple of suits at the curb, the Sewa captain’s face tightened and he stopped his interrogation.

  “You two, go and sit on that bench over there.” It was back inside the gate. “Don’t leave it. I’ll be right back.”

  The women didn’t move to obey and he shot them a glare over his shoulder before intercepting the Tucson detectives.

  “What do you think?” Ms. Jardine asked.

  “I think we’ve got to be careful here. If we go in there and wait for him and he wins this argument, he just might detain us as material witnesses.”

  “Yeah. This guy seems to have his heart set on your uncle as the killer.” Jardine shook her head. “You really think Mad Dog is here?”

  “It sure sounds like it,” Heather said. “I mean, this guy knew about Hailey and the Mini Cooper.”

  “So, what should we do?”

  Heather’s preference would have been slipping into the shadows and going to look for her uncle, but that wouldn’t work. “Why don’t you stay here and use my cell. Try Mad Dog. I know it’s after two in Kansas, but call my dad next. He needs to know what’s going on, especially if we get taken in. He might be able to make some things happen from his end.”

  “While you do what?”

  “I’m going to join that conversation. If somebody takes us into custody, I’d rather be in the hands of your big city pros than a tribal force we don’t know anything about. It’s too easy for little law enforcement agencies to let the legal niceties slide if that’s more convenient. I don’t think the Tucson Police Department will do that, especially if you’ve managed to let Dad know what’s happening.”

  Ms. Jardine agreed. She took Heather’s cell phone and started punching numbers. Heather turned toward the street. She got a much angrier glare from the Sewa captain as she pulled her ID and introduced herself to the Tucson detectives.

  “Welcome to town, Deputy English,” one of them said. “What’s your interest in this?”

  “We were in the process of establishing that,” the Sewa said. “Now, young lady, if you’d just go back over there with your friend and wait for me….”

  Heather nodded toward the captain. “This man seems to think my uncle killed his officer. He’s wrong about that, but he believes we’re withholding evidence instead of cooperating. I thought maybe we should talk to you before he starts the water boarding.”

  ***

  The sex shop was fresh out of breechcloths, but they had other things Mad Dog could strap on. A selection stood like a row of absurd stalagmites on a nearby display case.

  At least they had body paint. Mad Dog decided on the large container of licorice, since he favored a nearly solid black look, except for vanilla lightning bolts. He bought some cherry, as well, to use as tint for the sand p
ainting he wanted to make, and a little blueberry because he liked to mix that and vanilla to highlight the cosmological singularity, even if it wasn’t traditional.

  Mad Dog would have explained all this to the guy behind the counter, but the man seemed infected by a terminal case of ennui. What marginal interest he managed related to the items that Mad Dog might purchase, not how Mad Dog planned to use them. The guy at the magazine rack, though, moved from the bondage section to spanking—as close as he could get to listen in. Somehow, Mad Dog didn’t feel like discussing Cheyenne religious concepts when a man wearing a raincoat on a cloudless evening hovered nearby.

  “Anything else?” the counterman muttered.

  “There is one thing.” Mad Dog could do with some corn pollen, but he was allergic to it. He’d discovered the perfect substitute, however. It was bright and sparkly and he’d first run across the product in a Wichita toy store. “I don’t suppose you have any Genuine Official Magic Faerie Dust?”

  The counterman’s heavy eyelids lifted for the first time. He pulled away, ever so slightly. The guy in the raincoat suddenly decided to browse the most distant magazines, a section labeled FARM ANIMALS.

  “No faerie dust?” Mad Dog had picked up on the men’s reaction to the “f” word. He flopped a limp wrist in the counterman’s direction and asked, “You probably don’t have the unrated version of the Brokeback Mountain video, either?”

  They didn’t, and Mad Dog decided to stop amusing himself at their expense. “Just the body paints, then.” He paid cash and the counterman took it gingerly.

  Mad Dog carried his bag of goods to the front door, where he found he couldn’t resist one last barb. “Thank you so much,” he said in his best imitation of Truman Capote. “I’ll be sure to recommend your wonderful establishment to all my friends.”

  He minced out onto a deserted sidewalk and closed the door on a pair of horrified expressions. Mad Dog would have laughed, but a sudden flash of headlights reached around the building from the lot where he’d left his Mini. A police cruiser stuck its nose out of the lot and onto the sidewalk and an officer climbed from behind the wheel, cold eyes fixed on Mad Dog as the man reached for his side arm. The officer drew it, but he never managed to point it in Mad Dog’s direction. Hailey flew around the corner and took it out of his hand. She passed Mad Dog in an explosion of claws and fur and disappeared around the opposite corner of the building, still carrying the weapon in her teeth.