Текст книги "Dry Bones"

Автор книги: Craig Johnson

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 16 страниц)

“Why do I have your cell phone?”

“Because there are three messages from the Philadelphia Police Department, and if I answer it and it’s my husband, in the mood I’m in, I’m going to give him an earful.” She called back over her shoulder, “Answer it if you want to, and while you’re at it, tell him I want a divorce and he can have custody of Ethel Merman there.”

I deposited the phone in my jacket pocket and considered my granddaughter. The little bundle’s cries became so shrill that I was sure she was going to rupture something. I turned to look at the Bear and began to bounce up and down ever so slightly. “She does have a set of lungs on her.”

He reached out and settled me with a hand on my shoulder. “She just came in on a turbulence-ridden airplane, Walt, perhaps she would like to be held still.”

He had a point. I placed two fingers on the edge of the blanket and pulled it down so that I could see her chocolate-brown eyes, an anomaly in my family. She was sweating from exertion, but I tipped her up a bit more and brought her a little closer.

They tell you about how your life changes in ways you’d never suspect when you have children, but I think it might be even worse with grandchildren. Maybe because it’s parenting one step removed, or maybe it’s the novelty of it being a part-time job, but whatever it was, it hit me like a tsunami when I looked at her. “You’re upsetting your mother.”

Instantly, she stopped crying and stared at me.

“I don’t mind. You can scream all you like as far as I’m concerned, but you also have to stop when we get to the truck because you’ll scare Dog.”

She blinked her eyes, and a bubble of drool collected at the corner of her tiny mouth.

“You need to be on your best behavior, especially since you haven’t met Dog yet.”

She continued to stare at me, her mouth moving just a little as if chewing my words.

I glanced at the Cheyenne Nation. “See, we are simpatico.”

He studied the two of us like specimens. “Um hmm.”

The phone in my pocket began vibrating and suddenly started playing some sort of hip-hop song. I handed Lola to Henry and began fishing the thing out. “I better get that and let him know that his family is here safe, if pissed.”

Looking at the screen, which did, indeed, read PHILADELPHIA POLICE DEPARTMENT, even I was able to discern the green ANSWER button. “Hey, is this about those unpaid parking tickets?”

There was a long pause, and then an unfamiliar voice responded. “Hello? This is Chaplain Anthony Keen, and I’d like to speak with Cady Moretti, if I could, please?”

A chaplain.

“I’m afraid she’s indisposed at the moment. I’m her father, Absaroka County Sheriff Walt Longmire. Can I help you?”

“I need to speak with Mrs. Moretti, if I could, please?”

“Look, she’ll be back in just a minute . . . What’s going on?”

“You say you’re her father?”

“I am.”

The pause was longer this time. “There’s been an incident involving her husband, Patrolman Michael Moretti.”

“What kind of incident, Chaplain?”

“You’re her father, his father-in-law?”

“Yes, damn it.”

“He’s been shot in the line of duty.”

I felt that quarter shift in all points of reference as I formed the next words carefully. “How bad?”

This was the longest pause so far, and I had time to look over and see Cady standing an arm’s length away, staring at me as she reached for the phone. “Sheriff Longmire, I’m very sorry.”

8

Dog lay on the sofa while the Bear and I sat on the floor on either side of the Pack ’n Play and watched Lola chew on the corner of a blanket Saizarbitoria had been kind enough to provide. “How is the family?”

“I don’t know.” I glanced toward the bedroom, where I could barely hear Cady. “She’s talking to Michael’s mother right now.”

“Lena?”

I was having a hard time concentrating and forgot that the two had met in Philadelphia what seemed a century ago but was actually just a couple of years. “Yep.”

“How did it happen?”

I thought about what Cady had told me after she had spoken with the chaplain. “Routine traffic stop at Fifth and Lombard. He pulled a guy over for a broken headlight, walked up to the window . . .”

“So, it was a random incident.”

“Yep, at least . . .” I looked at him. “Why do you ask that?”

Lola made a noise, and the Cheyenne Nation reached out and gave her a stuffed horse rattle that looked as if it belonged in a museum. “Do they have the assailant in custody?”

“I don’t know.” I leaned against Dog’s sofa and, with my hands in my lap, sat there thinking about the late nights Martha had suffered through when I was being patched up by EMTs, in emergency rooms, or worse, not hearing anything. It’s part of the contract, and those who serve are not the ones who receive the worst of it; those who stand and wait for that phone call or the knock on the door that tells you that the other half of you won’t be coming home, ever—those are the ones who live through a kind of pain that most will never know.

“I made chicken tomatillo soup while the two of you were talking. I will put it in the refrigerator if no one is hungry.”

I focused my eyes on him. “You should go home—you’ve done so much.”

“I will wait until she gets off the phone.”

I glanced at the door leading to my bedroom. “That could be half the night.”

“I have nothing but time.”

I couldn’t hear her voice any more. “Maybe I should go in there.”

“I do not think so.”

I stared at my hands, finally reaching up and petting Dog so that they had something to do. “I’m kind of at a loss, Henry.”

“I can tell.” He waited for a moment. “Do you suppose anyone has told Vic?”

I was jarred by the thought. “I don’t know . . .”

“Would you like me to drive into town and tell her?”

I thought about it. “No, she’s probably asleep—she’s been through so much already today, and I wouldn’t be surprised if her phone was turned off. She tends to do that when she’s drinking a bottle of wine.” I smiled. “I think she gets into trouble when she has a little too much and the phone is available—I’ve been the recipient of some of those calls.”

“Hmm.” He grunted, picked up the rattle, and wriggled it, further entrancing my granddaughter. Lola giggled with delight, which made the scenario all the worse.

“I’ll go over there first thing in the morning—she usually sleeps late when she’s not on duty—after we get everything settled here.” I looked back at him. “If things are ever settled here again.”

The floor creaked, and I looked up to see Cady, standing with the phone in her hand. I struggled to a standing position and stood there looking at her like an archway with the keystone missing. “Is she okay?”

She leaned against the bathroom door and wrapped her arms around herself. “No, she’s not.”

We watched as Dog, sensing that someone needed comforting, slipped off the sofa and approached her, burying his head between her legs and standing there threatening to lift her off the ground if she didn’t pet him. She finally brought a hand down and scratched his head with her lacquered fingernails, tears falling onto his nose.

Henry saved me with a response. “Is there anything we can do?”

She looked at the wall. “Lena’s been trying to get hold of Vic, but she’s got her phones turned off. Could someone go over there in the morning and tell her what’s going on?”

“I’ll take care of it.”

Henry spoke softly. “How are you?”

“How do you think I am?”

He nodded and stood, my granddaughter crying out at the loss of him and the horse rattle. The Cheyenne Nation reached down and scooped her up, tucking her on his hip and putting the toy on the kitchen table.

Cady collapsed into herself, taking a step toward him. “Henry, I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “Do not be silly.” He stepped toward her and tucked her into his other hip, holding my little family, a family that was even smaller as of today. “We are all here for you, at the beck and call of your slightest wish.” He pulled her in even closer and kissed the top of her head. “Because we love you.”

Lola wrapped her fingers into her mother’s and the Bear’s hair, and all I could think was, hang on, little one, hang on to the ones you love because that’s all we’ve got in this world. Never let go.

His voice resounded off the top of Cady’s head. “Are you hungry?”

The head shook. “No, thought of food doesn’t sit well right now.”

“Understandable.” Loosening himself, he handed the baby to me and stepped to the counter, opened the refrigerator, and placed the large pot inside. “Remember that this is in here.”

We both nodded and watched as he walked to the door. “If you need anything, anything at all, please call me.”

Cady responded, knowing the social ethic of the Northern Cheyenne and that he would not return again until invited. “Uncle Bear, come back over for coffee in the morning.”

He smiled. “I will.”

The door closed, and we were left with ourselves.

I nudged the baby up and smelled her, clean and powdered. She gurgled, and I smiled at her mother. “How ’bout a cup of tea?”

“Tea?”

I raised an eyebrow in an attempt to be funny. “What, I don’t seem like a tea guy to you?”

She smiled, humoring me. “No, you don’t.”

I handed her Lola and began about the business of putting the steam kettle on. “Ruby gave it to me for Christmas; she thinks I drink too much coffee.”

“You do drink too much coffee—you have your whole life.”

I pulled the teabags from the tin box that had been kept over the refrigerator since her mother had been alive and brought out two mugs, both of them stolen from the Red Pony Bar and Grill. “Your mother once switched to decaf one week without telling me.” I set the mugs on the table between us. “I thought I was dying.”

The words were out of my mouth before I could whip them back. “I’m so sorry, Cady.”

Looking at the surface of the table, she swallowed and hugged Lola a little closer. She finally smiled. “What am I going to do, Dad?”

“Come back to Wyoming.”

She seemed shocked by the statement and stood there looking at me. “I meant this week.”

“Oh.”

Shaking her head, she sat at the table and whispered, “What am I going to do with you? What would I do with me?”

“It’s selfish, I know.”

“What would I do here, hang out a shingle? Wait for Lola to grow up and hope she will decide to be a lawyer?” She sadly bounced her on her knee. “Moretti and Longmire?”

I was frozen at that moment, thinking about what Virgil White Buffalo had said on the mountain, his words carrying with the rushing wind that wound to a screech: “She is to be married this summer and when she has the daughter she is now carrying, that daughter, your granddaughter, will carry the wrong man’s name . . .” I hadn’t understood what it was he was telling me at the time, but maybe the other name my granddaughter would carry would be my own.

“Dad?”

I looked at her. “Sorry, I was just thinking of something . . . something somebody said.”

She glanced away with a funny look. “The kettle is steaming.”

“Sorry.” I got up and went to the stove, took the whistling thing from the burner, and brought it over, filling the mugs. “Moretti and Longmire . . . Kind of has a ring to it.”

She shook her head, still bouncing Lola, the baby giggling from the pony ride. “So, what do you think, Monkey—you want to be a lawyer?” The baby immediately wrinkled her face and cried out. “I guess not.”

Automatically, I reached across the table and took her, resting her in the crook of my arm, picking up the rattle Henry had used to distract her. “C’mere, you Sweet Pea.” She whimpered a little but then settled down and stuffed the horse’s nose into her mouth. “Maybe she’ll be a sheriff.”

Realizing what I’d just said, I looked and found Cady staring at her mug.

 • • •

In the early morning, after calling Henry to make sure his arrival was imminent, I looked in on my daughter and granddaughter, warm and cuddled together on my bed. Dog and I had taken turns on the sofa; I’d had a troubled night, finding myself standing at the window, looking out at the Wyoming hills with my fingertips against the glass, half waiting to see the great horned owl on the teepee.

I kept thinking how much easier this would have all been if my wife were still here, and how I would’ve gladly traded places with her if only she could be here to console Cady and care for the baby. Martha was like that—she didn’t have to say anything but would simply lay her hand on you and suddenly things were all right.

Grabbing my thermos with too much coffee in it, I pushed the door open and stepped outside, pausing to hold it for Dog but finding my ever-present companion nowhere to be found. Quietly, I whistled, but he still didn’t come.

I crossed back toward the open bedroom door and could see that the great beast had crept up onto the bed and was now sleeping with the girls.

Abandoned. Say what you will about canine intelligence, he knew who needed to be comforted and protected. I shook my head, went out the door, and headed for town with a message I sorely did not want to deliver.

When I got to the little Craftsman house on Kisling, Vic was sitting on the front stoop, barefoot except for the protective boot, crutches at her side, and a cigarette swirling a thin plume past her face like the steam kettle from the previous night.

“Need a cup of coffee?”

She took a strong drag on the coffin nail. “I need two days off to go to Philadelphia and kill a cocksucker.”

“They catch him?”

“No, that’s why I need two days.”

I sat on the porch, spun off the top of my thermos with the words DRINKING FUEL printed on the side, and poured her a cup. “You’re smoking.”

She flicked ash into the wet grass. “Thanks, I think you’re hot, too.” She sipped the coffee. “I’m serious—I need some days.”

“Take a month.”

She nodded with a curt jerk of her head and took another slug of caffeine. We sat there for a while as she alternately inhaled the cigarette and sipped the coffee. Once or twice she turned and started to say something but then stopped and went back to her two-part job.

“Did you turn your phone on early this morning?”

“Yeah. The thing started ringing as soon as I did—scared the shit out of me.”

We sat there for a while more. “Your mother?”

“Father.”

Knowing the rocky relationship between Vic and the Chief of Detectives North back in Philadelphia, I was glad I hadn’t been here for that phone call. “What have they got?”

“The guy walked away clean.”

I studied the side of her face. “Walked? I thought it was a traffic stop.”

She turned and looked at me. “He pulled this asshole over, and then another asshole stepped up behind him and shot him in the back; then when he went down, the motherfucker shot him in the face.” She stopped talking, and her nostrils flared. “I mean while he’s fucking lying there on his back . . . In the face.”

“No arrests?”

“No, I told you . . . if I have my way there won’t be any, just a brief impression on the muddy banks of the Delaware River before the current carries the body away.”

“Plates?”

“Stolen.”

“Driver’s license, ID on either of the men?”

She puffed the cigarette some more. “A sketchy description from a taxicab driver and a woman looking out her third-floor window.”

“Your family on it?”

She shook her head. “Internal Affairs and Admin won’t allow for it, but if I know my brothers and my father . . .” She turned and looked at me. “Thirty-two years old.”

I took a deep breath. “I know.”

“That family thing, it never lets up, huh? I mean, here I am two thousand miles from mine. I know I act like it’s not really important to me, but . . .” She sighed. “The ties that bind.” She studied my face, and there was a spark of triumph. “I finally came up with one you don’t know?” She drained the dregs of her coffee. “Bruce Springsteen.”

“Actually, it’s a hymn from 1872 by John Fawcett, ‘Blest Be the Tie That Binds.’”

“Fuck.” She held the chrome cup out to me. “How’s Cady?”

I refilled her and then put the cap on and set the thermos between us. “As well as can be expected, I guess. She’s holding on to Lola for dear life.”

“She flying back today?”

“I would imagine so.”

“Maybe I can just piggyback with the two of them.”

“I’m sure she would appreciate it.”

She nodded and stubbed the cigarette out on the concrete. “I’m looking for a way to think good things.”

“Me, too.”

She struggled up, and I fetched the crutches for her. “I guess I don’t get to go to Hardin, huh?”

“We’ll always have Hardin.”

I opened the door for her, and she lodged the pads under her arms. “Is it nice in the spring?”

“Like Paris.”

She nodded and hopped into the house as I stood there holding the storm door. “They don’t get something on this, I’m going to need you to come to Philadelphia.”

I breathed a laugh. “It’s the fifth largest police force in the country and they’ve got really good people to . . .” She turned to look at me, and we stood there staring at each other. “Of course I will.”

She allowed the glass door to close silently between us.

 • • •

Ruby was the only one in the office when I got there, and I explained the situation as she followed me to the back. “What are you going to do?”

“I need to go to Hardin and look up this Joseph Free Bird, but . . .” I sat in my chair and looked out the window at the sky with hard-edged clouds evaporating into shades of early morning blue. “I don’t know—I don’t think I can leave this situation with Danny Lone Elk, Trost, the FBI . . .”

She stood in front of my desk. “What does Cady want you to do?”

“She hasn’t said.”

“Then you have to do the hardest thing and wait.”

I nodded and scrubbed my hands across my face. “I’m tired, Ruby.”

“Why don’t you take a nap before everyone gets here?”

I laughed. “Oh, that’d look good: me in here sleeping on the taxpayer’s dollar.”

She studied me, the picture of empathy. “Dime—the taxpayer’s dime. They don’t pay you enough for it to be a dollar.” She folded her arms. “Walter, considering the circumstance, I don’t think anyone would fault you in anything you do.”

I sat there for a long time, but she wouldn’t go away. “I wish Martha were here.”

She broke a sob and then stifled it quickly. “Oh, Walter.”

“It just seems like I made this deal with the universe to serve and protect, and in return, little by little, I get everything I care about taken away from me.”

“You need to stop this talk now.”

I stood and walked to the window, clenching fists, the sound like studded tires on a roadway. “That’s fine if the fates want to monkey around with me—but there my daughter is with a brand-new baby and no husband.” I turned toward her. “I’ll tell you, if I knew which cosmic office out there to go to, I’d do it and grab some winged or horned son-of-a-bitch by his throat and throw him out his window.”

She smiled a sad smile. “My money’s on you.”

I tried to stretch my shoulders, feeling like one massive, tangled knot.

We could both hear a couple of people entering from outside and then trooping up the steps. Ruby turned toward the door. “I better go do my job.”

“Earn your dime’s worth?”

She nodded. “Yes.” She started to go but stopped, and I could see the tears in her eyes. “Please try and keep your sense of humor, Walter, for all of us, but especially for yourself. You become most frightening when you misplace it.”

I turned back to the window, all at once seeing the ghostly image of myself. “Yes, ma’am.”

I could hear people talking in the outside office and felt someone watching me at the doorway. I turned to see the Bobs, looking like very large, forged-steel andirons.

“Hey, because we’re getting toward the end of our forty-and-found, the commandant keeps givin’ us these babysitting jobs, and we’re getting kind of bored with it.” Robert cleared his throat. “Let’s go to Hardin, Montana, Sheriff.”

Bob interrupted him. “And let’s go there at a hundred and twenty miles an hour.”

Boy howdy.

 • • •

At a hundred and twenty, the sweeping hillsides of the Little Big Horn country seemed like the banked turns on a fictional Montana International Speedway. I glanced over and could see Robert’s hands relaxed on the wheel as the motor on the big utility Interceptor roared like a treed cat.

I spoke through the steel grating from the back of the vehicle. “What kind of motor does this thing have?”

“Hell if I know. Bob?”

His partner turned to look at me. “I don’t know—you open the hood and all you see is plumbing and electronics. Not as sweet as that ’66 LeMans of mine, but she by-gawd moves, doesn’t she?”

“Yep.” Both men were studiously avoiding the subject of my daughter or of Michael’s death. “Did either of you guys call Montana to tell them we were on their turf?”

They looked at each other and then Bob glanced back at me. “We really didn’t see any reason for bothering them.”

“Right.”

Traveling at high speed across the Crow Reservation, I thought about the truncated conversation I’d had with Cady and thought about calling her back but figured there wasn’t any reception even if the HPs had a phone I could borrow. My daughter was with Henry, the best person I knew to be with when in a tight spot, and I figured it might be best to give her a little time to make arrangements without me hovering over her.

I thought about Lena, Cady’s mother-in-law and Lola’s grandmother, and Vic and Michael’s mother, and the hardship she must be going through—the loss of a child. I couldn’t think of anything worse.

“So, who is this jaybird, anyway?”

I looked at Bob. “His name is Joseph Free Bird, a supposed doctor, but involved with illegal drugs associated with the Tre Tre Nomads, an Indian gang up here and over on Pine Ridge. Henry says he’s NN.”

“What’s NN?”

“Non-Native, but all I’m interested in is his connection to Danny Lone Elk.”

Robert passed an eighteen-wheeler like a Saturn rocket. “The rancher who owned the T. rex?”

Bob made a face. “That’s an odd connection.”

“That’s why we’re going to Hardin.”

Robert called over his shoulder, “Surprise, we’re there.”

Slowing the vehicle to a somewhat reasonable speed, the HP ducked the nose of the thing with a touch of the brakes and made a left, heading into the town of Chi-jew-ja, as the Crow called it.

We cruised down old Highway 87, then took a right on North Center Avenue and then another right as we slowed down and arrived at the industrial section of town, the Three Rivers prison facility looming straight ahead.

Hardin had already hit hard times when a for-profit prison management corporation out of Texas convinced the powers that be that a high-security facility would be a good idea for the town’s economy and could employ a hundred locals in an area already saddled with 10 percent unemployment.

It sounded too good to be true.

It was.

Sitting on grazing land usually inhabited only by pronghorn antelope, Three Rivers was a ghost facility, 96,000 square feet of state-of-the-art prison capable of holding 464 inmates, the glinting razor-wire spirals guarding only the animals, the thing sitting empty for more than ten years.

Hardin sued the state of Montana for its legislative mixed message of support, given even though it is against Montana law to incarcerate prisoners from out of state. Amazingly, the tiny town won the case, but not so amazingly, the settlement didn’t cover the $27 million worth of bonds that had gone defunct.

There was a glimmer of hope that the project would be resurrected when the federal government announced that the Guantanamo Bay facility in Cuba was to be closed, but the three-man Montana congressional delegation was pretty quick to put the kibosh on bringing al-Qaeda to Big Sky Country.

Reading the address from the slip of paper that Isaac Bloomfield had given me, I told Robert to stop at what looked to be an abandoned trucking port, probably built as part of the prison complex, complete with loading bays, ramps, and a few abandoned vehicles in assorted states of disrepair.

He wheeled into the parking lot next to a black, lifted half-ton with heavily tinted windows. “This the place?”

Bob swiveled the computer on the center console and began typing in the plate number; after a moment, the information ran across the screen, along with a picture of a severe-looking individual with long hair and a thin face and neck. “Ladies and germs, may I present Joseph Free Bird.” He turned to look at me. “What the hell kind of bullshit name is that?”

Robert laughed. “Must be a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan.”

I stared at the two comics through the steel grate. “You guys want to let me out?”

The Bobs looked at each other again. “Robert, I think he’s trying to keep all the fun to himself.”

“Say it ain’t so, Bob.”

“Open the door.”

They both turned and looked at me, Robert nudging his partner in noncrime. “He’s kind of cranky; I’m thinking we shouldn’t let him out of the unit—he’s likely to do damage to the citizenry.”

“I’m liable to do damage to this shiny new Interceptor with this .45 I’ve got on my hip if you two jackboots don’t let me out of this damn car.”

They got out, and Bob opened the rear passenger-side door.

“I don’t suppose I could convince you guys to stay out here?”

Bob looked at his buddy across the shiny black sheet metal. “I’m beginning to think he doesn’t enjoy our company, Robert.”

“I think you’re right, Bob.”

I glanced at the loading dock and the wire-covered glass in the office door. “Gimme five minutes and then you guys can come in.”

Robert shook his head at his partner and then at me. “Why?”

“Because I think I’m likely to exercise a little badass, and I’d just as soon there be as few witnesses as possible.”

Bob lifted his space-age chronograph and punched a few buttons on his wrist. “You got five minutes and twenty seconds since I think it’ll take you that long to get to the door.”

I started walking.

If the place had ever been a thriving trucking port, it had fallen on hard times. There wasn’t any sign that indicated there was a business present, but the number matched the one on the paper, so I checked the knob—it was locked. Ignoring the hidebound ideas of breaking and entering, inadmissible evidence, and the forty-odd civil restrictions on what I was doing, I used the ever-handy 13-D search warrant.

The door bounced off the wall, but I caught it on the rebound, palming it back open and walking into what must’ve once been a reception or dispatching area. There was no equipment, not even a phone, and there was trash in ruptured bags sitting along the walls and spilling onto the floor.

If Free Bird Enterprises was a going concern, it wasn’t evident here.

There was some kind of old-time rock and roll playing from further inside the building, so I went around a battered counter toward another wire-glass-paned door, this time unlocked, and, pushing it open, I stepped into a short hallway with an old punch clock on the wall and two doors marked HIS and HERS.

The music was coming from my left where the hallway opened up into a massive room, built large enough to hold the containers of at least a half-dozen eighteen-wheelers. In the nearest bay there was a nonoperable conveyer belt with stacks and stacks of cardboard packing supplies and four young Native teenagers working away, putting what I assumed was the buffalo chip and lawn clipping samplers in boxes.

I took a few more steps and loudly cleared my throat.

One of the young men, wearing a do-rag and a multitude of tattoos, looked up, saw me, and froze, but then nudged the guy working beside him. The second guy disappeared, and suddenly the music stopped and an older man came over and looked at me. He had the ubiquitous pasty face of a white guy, a glazed look, and the ponytail that Lucian would say made it easier to identify a genuine horse’s ass.

“Hey, can I help you?”

I pulled my jacket back to reveal not only my star, but also the Colt on my hip. “I’m looking for Joseph Free Bird.”

He glanced around, and I wasn’t sure if he thought he could make a run for it or was going to try to finger one of the kids. “Um . . . that’s me.”

If I was looking for a tough guy to vent my rage on, he wasn’t it. “I kind of figured.” I took a step forward. “Walt Longmire, sheriff of Absaroka County, Wyoming.”

It was about that time that the second kid pulled something out of his pants and dropped his hand alongside his leg.

Dipping a hand to my own sidearm, I looked at him with intent. “At the risk of sounding a little dramatic, how about you show me what you just pulled out of your pants.”

He glanced at the others and then back at me.

“If you don’t show me what you’ve got in your hand right now, I’m going to have to pull mine—and I bet mine’s bigger.”

He still didn’t move.

“Did you hear me?” I waited a second more and then leveled the big Colt at him. “Show me your hands.”

He finally spoke, his eyes wide. “It’s not a gun.” He glanced down at his side. “Um, it looks like a gun, but it’s not. Honest, it’s a paintball gun, but it looks real.”

“Bring it up slow with your finger away from the trigger, got me?”

“Yeah.”

He did as I said, and even from this distance, I could see the red plastic trim around the muzzle indicating it wasn’t real. As he held it in front of him, I became aware of two very large men standing behind the group with their own weapons drawn.

“Why in the heck are you carrying that thing?”

“Protection.”

I reholstered my sidearm as the Bobs came up from behind, slipped the toy away from the kid, and tossed it into one of the boxes full of Styrofoam packing peanuts.

“More likely it’ll get you killed.”

“Damn kid. I just about sent what little brains you got to . . .” Robert shook his head as he flipped the flap on one of the boxes. “Alicia Hammonds, Wetumpka, Alabama.”

 • • •

“Yeah, he’s a patient of mine but most of what I sell him these days is turtle food.”

We were sitting halfway inside a cavernous tractor trailer with the sour smell of fresh-cut truck skids in our nostrils; at least that’s what I hoped the smell was. He was sitting on a stack of them as I stood, glancing out the back where the Bobs patted down the rest of the gang.

“Turtle food?”

He nodded his head. “Yeah, he buys the stuff by the fifty-pound bag.” He gestured toward his accomplices. “One of my guys drives a pickup full down once a month.”

“But he was a patient of yours?”

“Yeah, kind of. I had to close the clinic, but I still have my mail-order business and provide to a few of my regular clients.”