Prairie Gothic Page 6

  “My left one?” Two wondered. “Yeah. Pedal’s all the way down.”

  “All right, now. Take ahold of the shifter here and shove it to the left and forward so’s you’re in first gear.” Two did as instructed. “Now, gently, push your right foot down on the accelerator as you lift your other foot off the clutch.”

  “Like this?” The sheriff’s cruiser spun its back wheels, then the tires chirped and grabbed and the car jumped forward like a dragster coming off the line.

  “It would be good if you stayed on the street,” One observed from the back seat. Wynn wasn’t saying anything because he was too busy cringing as they climbed the curb. The front bumper avoided an oak by inches. Heather Lane got them back in the street as the engine approached red line on the tach. She took her foot off the accelerator half a moment before she put her other foot back on the clutch. Everyone jerked forward until she shifted gears and popped the clutch again. This was executed even less smoothly than her initial effort, but there were so many cubic inches of ancient Detroit iron under the hood that it was almost impossible to stall, even when you managed to miss a couple of gears and go directly into fourth.

  “How was that?” Two wondered, proud of the success she’d managed on her very first try.

  “I think she’s getting the hang of it, don’t you, Deputy?” One said.

  Wynn couldn’t find his voice to answer. They accelerated out of town, headed south along Adams Street, racing the wind and beginning to win.

  “You are such a sweetheart, agreeing to teach us how to drive a manual transmission,” Two told him, taking her eyes off the road just long enough to bring the tires on Wynn’s side to the edge of an especially deep ditch.

  “Ulp!” Wynn responded graciously. He couldn’t get enough breath for a terrified scream.

  ***

  Judy English studied the names on her list and remembered their faces, figures, and characters. The sophomore had to be too skinny. No way she could have hidden a pregnancy in that scrawny body of hers, and yet…Judy remembered noticing a bit of a tummy on her last week. She’d thought it might be evidence of malnutrition. The other two, the seniors, seemed more likely. One of them was Marilyn Monroe voluptuous. Lots of room in those ample curves to hide an extra bulge. The other was a strikingly beautiful girl with a weight problem. She had trouble saying no to food—or sex. Self-esteem issues, Judy decided.

  She probably ought to tell Englishman, Judy thought, but she was still pissed at him for that bizarre call about the car. She reached out and picked up a picture from her desk. Englishman stood in the front yard, a Heather at either shoulder and an explosion of morning glories erupting behind them. He could make her so angry…or so horny.

  He still looked good at forty-seven. His face was more weathered; the crinkles around his amazingly blue eyes were deeper than she remembered all those years ago when she was a teen and he was a wounded war hero. She’d looked across the gym at a Bison’s basketball game and decided he was the one. His hairline was a little higher, just a hint of gray dusted his temples, but he still had that calm, noble look that had turned her on. The Cheyenne heritage Englishman and Mad Dog’s mother had claimed, and Judy’s genealogical research appeared to confirm, was evident in his high cheekbones, his Roman nose, and his dark complexion. She, and plenty of other girls, had thought he looked exotic and dreamy. Hot!

  Judy smiled. They’d been right. He was hot. He certainly lit her romantic fires. There’d never been any shortage of passion in their relationship, either when they loved or when they fought. He’d told her, once, that was what first intrigued him about her. She was feisty. If she didn’t agree with him, and she usually didn’t, she let him know. And fighting with him was fun because it was so much more fun making up afterwards. Though, for a while there, it hadn’t looked like there would be an afterwards. They’d gotten divorced. Even then, they’d gone right on fighting…and loving.

  But damn Englishman. What was that call about the car really about? It wasn’t like him to try to annoy her. Not on purpose. These days, when she got mad, he seldom showed his own temper. He usually just backed off and let her have the last say. He was trying hard to make it work this time. She loved him even more for that.

  Why would he care where the Taurus was if he didn’t want to use it? She glanced back down at her list of potential sex kittens and suddenly knew.

  She was breathing hard when she picked up the phone. She fumbled, punching in their home number. Had to do it twice to get it right. The answering machine clicked in after the first ring.

  “Hi!” One of Two greeted her. It wasn’t their usual message. Englishman was on that one. “We’re ill. We’re trying to nap. Please call later, or leave a message and we’ll return your call when we can.” Judy thought she could hear Two talking to someone in the background. And just the hint of a masculine reply before the recording stopped and the machine beeped at her.

  “Girls. It’s me. Pick up the phone please.” No one did, not even when Judy repeated her plea a couple of times in an increasingly higher register.

  Before the machine beeped to tell her she’d run out of time, Judy was slinging on her coat and digging in her purse for her keys, already out of the office and on her way to the parking lot.

  ***

  “Where have you been?”

  Stan Deffenbach was hopping around the lobby of the Sunshine Towers like a child in desperate need of a potty break. Lucille Martin took Deffenbach by the shoulder and gently pushed him aside. She looked older than she had earlier.

  “We do have a problem, Sheriff,” Mrs. Martin said. “Tommie Irons’ family came shortly after you left. Becky Hornbaker’s son, Simon, and one of his young brutes.”

  Becky Hornbaker was Tommie Irons’ sister and Supervisor Hornbaker’s wife. Simon was their only child, and his twin sons, Judah and Levi, were a pair of hulking bullies.

  “Apparently there’s some family heirloom missing and they’re upset about it. Simon went so far as to accuse poor Mr. Deffenbach and the Sunshine Towers staff of stealing it. Simon and Levi are still up there looking. They’ve terrified most of the residents. Perhaps you can make them leave and stop disassembling furniture and searching people’s rooms.”

  “What are they searching for? What’s missing?”

  “They won’t say.”

  “They won’t tell you what’s missing, but they want you to give it back?” The sheriff found such lack of logic hard to imagine, except of Hornbakers. It was also hard to picture Lucille Martin not getting a satisfactory answer or being disobeyed by anyone, even if she was currently without a ruler.

  “Precisely. It’s something small, I think, from some of the places they’ve looked for it. And from the energy they’re bringing to the search, it must be valuable. I told them they would have to leave, but they ignored me.”

  Was ignoring Lucille Martin permitted?

  “Please stop them,” Stan Deffenbach whined. “They’re ruining my business.”

  ***

  “Why did I let you talk me into this?” Wynn complained.

  “’Cause we blackmailed you,” One of Two said.

  “’Cause when you caught Gloria Ramirez on the street after midnight and accused her of being the phantom snowballer, you searched her,” Two added from behind the wheel. “Too thoroughly. I mean, who’s going to hide snowballs inside her bra?”

  “Now listen,” Wynn swiveled in his seat to fix his most severe look on both Heathers. His seat belt stopped him about halfway and the gesture came off more like petulant. “Nothing inappropriate about it at all. I been watchin’ them reality cop shows on my satellite dish. You’d be surprised where perpetrators hide things.”

  “Snowballs? In her brassiere?” Two accused.

  “Well, hey. It’s not like I strip searched her. I just patted her down.”

  “Nah. You copped a feel, and since she was out after hours and didn’t want her folks to know, she didn’t say anything because you let her sne
ak in her house afterwards. She didn’t tell her pa, who would likely come after you with an ax handle. And she didn’t tell her boyfriend, who would probably punch your lights out and then get arrested for assaulting a law officer.”

  “So she told us,” the Heather in the back seat continued, “’cause she thought we might hint to Dad that one of his deputies needed to learn to keep his hands to himself.”

  “Which we will, if we ever hear about you doing anything like that again,” Two resumed. “Or might, anyway, if you don’t keep your promise and teach us how to drive a standard shift.”

  “But why today?” Wynn complained.

  Two practiced downshifting to third again, then back up to fourth. “’Cause Englishman says he’ll start driving this cruiser more and leaving his truck for us once we learn how to handle a standard transmission. Only he’s never got the time to teach us. And, ’cause you’re actually a pretty sweet guy and would probably have done this out of the goodness of your heart if we’d only asked you nicely in the first place. Right, Heather?”

  “Right, Heather.”

  “OK, OK. Only let’s pull off on some back roads where you won’t have to pass any more semis. And let’s slow down, pretend there’s a thirty mile speed limit.”

  “Sure,” Two of Two agreed, swinging onto the first crossroad to the west. There was just enough patch ice in the intersection to let the back end go loose on her, only she steered into the skid and kept it on the road, managing a pretty smooth downshift into second in the process. “Is this better?”

  “Gack!” she decided, was probably not an affirmative response.

  ***

  Judy was out of the door before the Taurus stopped rolling. The wind finished the job she hadn’t completed with the brake pedal, bringing it to rest inches short of their front fence. The wind did its best to finish her, too, strafing her with snowflakes and tugging on her clothes as it resisted her frantic efforts to get to the front door.

  Boris met her with a delighted bound into her arms that almost knocked her down but seemed gentle in comparison to the buffets dealt by the wind.

  “Heathers!” Judy shouted. Relative silence was her only reply. Boris panted and tried to cover her with slobber. The house creaked and groaned as the storm probed it for weakness and rattled the windows. There was no sign of the girls, only the note on the dining room table. She had just finished reading it, crumpling it with rage, and was about to let loose a scream that would have been nearly as wild as her fears when the doorbell rang. Boris launched himself, madly barking, ready to battle the forces of darkness or welcome his wide circle of friends.

  It was the nosy woman from next door, so wrapped up in her parka that it took Judy a moment to recognize her. Boris exchanged barking for tentative tail wagging. He knew her but she wasn’t a dog person, not worth his time.

  “Is everything all right, Judy?” the woman asked. “The way you drove in, and after all the excitement over here today, well, I’d begun to worry.”

  “Excitement?” Judy pictured a band of armed terrorists seizing her house. She could see the fire trucks, visualize the row of ambulances, hear Englishman directing his SWAT team. Too bad Buffalo Springs only had one volunteer fire truck, an ambulance would have had to come from outside the county, and Englishman didn’t have enough deputies to police the roads, let alone put together a Special Weapons and Tactics unit.

  “First the deputy came by in the patrol car and left with the girls. Then your husband drove up and was in and out in a minute. Now you. I mean, I was concerned, especially after I noticed the girls letting themselves into your house just before dawn. I couldn’t imagine what they might have been up to.”

  Maybe her neighbor couldn’t. Judy’s imagination began selecting among a variety of disasters.

  ***

  Mad Dog’s Saab made it as far as the third bridge after the first turn south. Only the third bridge wasn’t there anymore. Mad Dog spent a moment thanking Maheo, the Cheyenne All Father, for the Swedish engineers who’d designed the Saab’s brake system. His tires were right at the edge, but on the right side of that edge.

  When had the bridge washed out? He’d driven this road not long ago, well, maybe a couple of years. Whether last year’s spring floods took it, or those of the year before, didn’t matter. What mattered was his only options were abandoning the car or going back. His throbbing left ear convinced him. He threw open the door, stepped out, and squinted back up the road into the wind. There was too much snow in the air to see anything. Maybe, if the truck were some color other than white…

  The nearest farmhouse was Tommie Irons’, about half a mile distant. Any other choices were all more than two miles away.

  Would whoever shot him know that? And, hell, who would want to kill him? Half the county was upset with his protest over the election’s results, or his vociferous support for other unpopular political causes, but he couldn’t imagine anyone actually shooting him because of that.

  Some of Tommie’s relatives might be ticked off. Not that any of them had cared enough to visit the old man while he was still alive. Again, Mad Dog couldn’t picture them coming after him with a gun.

  He slid into the ditch, climbed a barbed wire fence, and tested the ice on the stream. It was plenty solid, as well as plenty slick. He proved both, simultaneously, when his feet went out from under him and he slid all the way to the far bank. Hailey joined the game. She pounced on him, nuzzled him too close to his sore ear, then bounded into the underbrush beyond. Mad Dog thought he heard an engine coming down the road. He didn’t bother to confirm it. He just grabbed a handful of frozen branches and hauled himself off the frozen stream and into the brush, hot on Hailey’s trail.

  Mad Dog pulled his parka up over his ears as he went. The left was already so numb from the cold that it hardly complained. He stuffed his bare and bleeding hand deep into a flannel-lined pocket. He found wolf prints and followed them. After a few yards of scrub and skeletal tree trunks he found himself on the edge of a pasture. Hailey’s prints preceded him, already eroding to invisibility as the wind erased them. The Saab was a dark bruise back where the road should be. He thought he saw a truck-like shape behind it, then the wind and a fresh blast of driving snow made his eyes water and hid them from him. Mad Dog didn’t complain. He stretched his legs and began to run.

  He ran nearly every day, though usually not in heavy boots on frozen pasture. On the days when he didn’t feel like running, he reminded himself he was nearing sixty and aerobic exercise might add to life’s quality and quantity, then ran anyway. He liked to tell people he was running for his life. Now, suddenly, he really was.

  ***

  Every school child has encountered, by whatever name and sex, a Simon Hornbaker of their very own. Simon was two years older than the sheriff. When the one-room school, where English attended his first five grades, finally closed and he and his schoolmates were packed off to immense Buffalo Springs Elementary, Simon was the first student he met.

  Simon had been a scrawny, small-for-his-age, dull-normal sort—a natural target for the jokes and taunts of his own age group. But two years gave Simon a nice edge on a boy just entering sixth grade and without friends to offer the strength of numbers. On his first day, the boy who would be sheriff had approached the building overburdened by a load of books and anxieties. Simon picked young English out, recognized his fear, and struck, knocking everything from his hands as he fought through the crowded entrance. The sheriff still felt the humiliation, scrambling about on hands and knees, trying to rescue his belongings from beneath a stampede of students. Some had paused to smirk or giggle—maybe even grin a little wider because of the way Simon stood there and mocked him. One year was all it lasted. Less, really, because by the end English had friends. There wasn’t a middle school at Buffalo Springs then. Next year, Simon was suffering his own humiliations as a mere freshman at the high school next door. Their paths seldom crossed again, until English became a freshman himself. By then,
he was nearly Simon’s size. Too near for the harassment to continue. But for one brief year, Becky Hornbaker’s darling Simon was the sheriff’s worst nightmare.

  “Finally got here, eh, Sheriff. Took your sweet time. You find that thieving brother of yours yet?”

  Simon was sorting through the contents of a dresser drawer he’d brought into the hall. Well, not really sorting, more like tossing, piece by piece, into a pile at his feet.

  “Simon, what are you doing?”

  “Looking for our family’s property. Your nut-case brother made off with it.”

  “If Mad Dog took something, why search here?” He noticed the drawer contained women’s lingerie. “And whose room did that stuff come from? That’s not your uncle’s.”

  “Any of them old biddies who helped Mad Dog cart Uncle Tommie off coulda stole it. When there ain’t no law around, sometimes we gotta make our own.”

  Simon stirred the silks and satins with a foot, then turned toward the door. It led into Alice Burton’s room.

  “Simon. You don’t have permission to search this room. Mrs. Martin and Mr. Deffenbach said they’ve asked you to leave. Now I’m doing the same.”

  Simon had put on weight and muscle over the years. He probably had twenty pounds on the sheriff, though most of it hung over his belt. He tried to suck it all back into his chest as he swung around.

  “Who’s gonna make me?”

  The childishness of the remark took the sheriff right back to grade school. Hadn’t Simon matured at all?

  The sheriff edged to the side, getting a look around Simon and into the room, trying to reassure himself that Mrs. Burton was OK and Levi wasn’t waiting just inside to back his father’s play.

  The old lady was in her rocking chair by the window, but someone had tied her hands to its arms. Her eyes met his. “Get these filthy Hornbakers away from me, Sheriff!” she yelled.

  The sheriff let his hand drop near his holstered .38. “I want you to raise your hands, turn around, and put them on the wall.”

  “Like hell, you Englishman’s bastard,” Simon shot back, ever the master of juvenile repartee. His hand darted under his coat, like he was reaching for a gun of his own. The sheriff stepped in, pivoted, and kicked. Though the toe of his boot connected a foot lower than it would have when that sergeant taught him the move, the sheriff’s Army training paid off perfectly. Simon Hornbaker folded in half and collapsed against the wall with a crash. He wasn’t reaching for anything anymore, except maybe his breath. The sheriff stepped in, grabbed him by his hair, and straightened him out on the floor. A quick pat down revealed a cozy little 9 mm automatic. The sheriff dropped it in one of his own pockets and connected Hornbaker’s right wrist and left ankle with handcuffs. Simon tried to say something. It didn’t resemble any of the languages spoken in Benteen County.