Bad Company (15 page)

Chapter 13
Close Encounters

Hawk woke Sally up in the middle of the night, his body hard and heavy on top of her. “I have to use you,” was all he said, and there was nothing tender or gentle about it, or about her response.

And it scared her, that craving to be dragged over rough ground, to a jagged place. This kind of coupling wasn’t about warm sensuality, or about their respect and affection for each other, or about the depth of their mutual understanding. It wasn’t about having the ability to write true stories, or read maps, or conduct sparkling conversations regarding the events of the day. This pounding need clawed at her somewhere far beyond and below the brain or the heart. Not the kind of impulse Sally liked to own up to.

But if she was honest, she’d known a long time that she liked to walk the edge of the dark side. Over the years she’d teetered over the brink a time or two and plunged in. The hot threat appealed to some pulse in her, like the mean-ass sandpaper twang of Steve Earle’s singing, or Eric Clapton’s guitar screaming when he was strung out on pain and God only knew what else.

She had the luxury of waking up in the morning knowing that whatever went on between her and Hawk in the black night, she wanted as much as he did. If they used each other hard, the act was surrounded and cushioned by everything else they were to each other. But she hadn’t always been that noble, or that lucky. She’d had some bad close calls along the road. Mercifully, she had never paid too high a price for dallying with danger.

Some women got way more than their share of misfortune. Tanya Nagy’s luck had been so excessively bad that she’d passed it on to her daughter.

Hadn’t there once been a bestselling self-help book about smart women making stupid choices? But this wasn’t just a matter of stupidity. This was a wicked dive into the volcano.

On some level, she thought as she went through her coffee-making ritual, you couldn’t get away from the fact that humans were animals. Animals with giant frontal lobes, whose survival depended on making complicated choices: tinker, tailor, soldier, spy? Baseball, football, or basketball? Caf or decaf? People were hardwired for wide-open possibility, and capable of pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for high-minded purposes. Cows and catfish, wasps and wombats didn’t know jack shit about sacred honor. But still the beast lurked.

The espresso machine growled and hissed. Dark liquid dripped down. Hot steam shot into cold milk. Sally watched the white froth in the steel milk pitcher rise.

The search for Monette’s killer had made it onto the
Boomerang
’s front page, a small story below the fold. The sheriff said the investigation was ongoing. According to the medical examiner’s preliminary report, it did indeed appear that the victim had been raped. The head of the Jubilee Days Committee told the paper that the crime was deplorable, but blessedly rare for Laramie, and thank the good Lord they didn’t live in New York City or Miami or someplace where such things happened all the time.

That added a reassuring and typically xenophobic Laramie note. A plague of locusts could descend on Wyoming, and people would say that at least it wasn’t Chicago or San Francisco or someplace so overpopulated, they didn’t even
have
locusts.

The locusts were swarming in her head today. Sally always counted on the first cup of coffee to focus her brain and energize her body. This morning she got the usual spark of physical ignition, but she couldn’t get her thoughts to fall in line. She barely registered the
Boomerang
police report notice of the “unlawful entry” at her address on Tuesday night. Hell, she was having enough trouble assimilating what had happened to her very own self the night before. She needed to face it, though.

A hard tremor went through her. Too much for now. Follow Hawk’s example, she told herself. Keep on doing those normal things. He’d headed out early, as usual, for Thursday morning hoops with the annoyingly fascinating Scotty Atkins. She’d go for a jog. Just another dulcet summer day in the Gem City of the Plains. But as she laced up her running shoes, picked up her Walkman, and headed out the door, she felt as if she was steering into her street, her town, and her life, at an oblique angle, and all the things she took for granted had slid down to the bottom of the world. Everything was out of kilter, unfamiliar, and she was wafting in the fog.

Even the music didn’t help. Looking to touch the wordless place where beauty lived, she’d foregone her usual assortment of rock ’n’ roll, folk, and country tunes, and picked out a tape of Mozart piano concertos. But even as she found her stride and tried to let the pianist’s remarkable fingers massage her mind, she was seriously creeped. Was somebody following her? Lying in wait? As she ran up Sheridan Avenue, headed for Washington Park, she found herself looking at every parked car, at every driver in every vehicle that passed by, and bracing for another attack.

Ridiculous. Give it up. Turn up the concerto and get out of the funk. She was approaching the park band shell when she saw the Dodge pickup with the county twenty plates, parked at the curb. It took a moment for her brain to record the sight, and with her earphones on and her head still full of Mozart, she didn’t register the rapid footsteps coming out of the band shell, didn’t know a thing until he yanked her by the forearm and spun her around.

“I wanna talk to you, Mustang,” Bone said. “Let’s get in the truck.”

Sally rammed into him with her shoulder, throwing him off balance. But he held on to her arm, and they crashed, tangled up, onto the hard-packed dirt of the jogging track.

In an instant he was sitting on top of her, his thighs straddling her legs, his hands pinning her arms to the ground, giving her a close-up view of the broken veins in his eyes and on his nose, and far too good an acquaintance with a set of teeth that might not have been that great to begin with, and had not been improved by years of tobacco chewing. He smelled like a man riding a hard binge, sweating stale beer and cheap whiskey. He coughed in her face and she nearly gagged, kicking her feet wildly, without effect.

“Goddamn it to hell, stop struggling!” he hollered. “Or I’ll give you something to struggle about!”

“Leave me alone!” Sally hollered back. “Help! Somebody, help!”

“Shut up!” he hissed in her ear, lying flat on top of her to hold her down, and letting go of one arm to put his hand over her mouth. “I oughta beat the shit out of you, but that’s not why I’m here. Just shut up and listen a minute. I wanna talk to you.”

“Talk?” she said against his hard, damp palm, thinking about whether she should try to bite his hand.

“Yeah. Use your head, dumbass. Don’t you think if I really wanted to hurt you, I could?”

He had a point. She nodded.

“Now, I’m gonna let you up in a minute, and when I do, you’re gonna answer my questions, understand?”

Disoriented by the unprecedented experience of being assaulted in a public park, Sally didn’t understand much of anything, but she nodded anyway.

By the time he rolled off her, two elderly women in large straw walking hats, a young mother pushing a sleeping baby in a stroller, a muscle-bound male jogger, and a kid with a soccer ball had gathered to see what was wrong.

“Just a friendly little tussle,” Bone told them, getting to his feet and slapping dust off his jeans. “Just showing my old pal Sally here a few wrestling holds.” He patted the kid on the head and kicked the soccer ball away, like he was the chief counselor at Camp Hell playing every game at the camp—wrestling, soccer, you name it.

The kid ran after his ball. The walking ladies looked worried. The jogger looked suspicious. The baby kept sleeping. The mother pulled a cell phone out of her diaper bag and said to Sally, “Should I call nine-one-one?”

The man was drunk, and maybe half crazy, but by now Sally was considering the encounter as a golden chance to ask Bone some questions of her own. “Nope. No problem, everything’s fine here. Old Bone is a great kidder, aren’t you, Bone?” She couldn’t resist jabbing him in the ribs with her elbow.

“Unh. Yeah.” He put his arm around her and pinched her biceps hard. She’d have a nice bruise. “Just kidding. You folks’ll excuse us, now, won’t you?”

The little crowd dispersed.

“Not in the truck, Bone,” Sally told him through clenched teeth. “If you want to talk, we can sit on a bench and talk. If you don’t mind, I’d just as soon we had our conversation in a nice, public place.”

He appeared to consider his options. “Okay. This won’t take long.”

They found a bench. Bone was sweat-soaked, plum-colored, and wheezing hard from their encounter, but as soon as they sat down, he reached in his shirt pocket, found a crumpled pack of Camel Lights, and lit up.

“I thought you chewed,” she said.

“Lotta places these days where you can’t smoke,” he explained. “I like to have options.”

Mr. Pro-Choice. Sally had been running, lifting weights, watching her nutrition, and taking long, stress-reducing baths for ten years, and with all that, she’d been unable to overpower an alcoholic smoker who probably lived on canned beef stew and TV dinners, whose tongue would one day rot right out of his head. That really pissed her off. “Okay, Bone,” she snapped. “What gives?”

He took a hard drag on his cigarette, double-inhaled through his nose (just to make sure he didn’t miss any carcinogens), blew out a stream of smoke long enough to document for a class action suit. And finally he said, “Who killed my daughter?”

That was a curveball. “Why would you think I’d know?”

Bone considered the glowing end of his cigarette. “I been keeping an eye on you and Delice ever since you hassled me at the Loose Caboose. The both of you always did think you got the right to stick your faces in everybody’s business. You’re even worse than she is, and that’s sayin’ a whole lot. You probably don’t remember giving me a raft of shit one night when Tanya and me had a disagreement at the Gallery. You got me throwed right out of that place. I been a little annoyed with you ever since.”

He was right. She didn’t remember.

He narrowed his eyes and stared her down. “Nobody likes a busybody. Last night at the rodeo, somebody let you know that, didn’t they, Sally?”

“You saw me get pushed into the bucking chute?” she asked, matching him stare for stare.

Bone looked back at her, silent.

“Did you push me?”

He took another drag of his smoke, crushed it out on the bench, very deliberately. “Reckoned you mighta had some idea about who did.”

She squinted at him. “And what if I do?”

He looked down, then back up. “Way I figure, you’ve probably mouthed off enough in your time that half the guys in town’d just as soon kill you as hose you. Then again, you’re the one found Monette, and you been stirrin’ the pot ever since.”

Sally was aghast. “Found her? What the hell are you talking about?”

Bone sighed. “That brilliant lawman Dickie Langham had me in for questioning Tuesday. In the middle of our little chat, one of his deputies came into the interview room and asked him something, and he got up and went over to talk to the guy. He’d been looking at the file on the murder and left it open, and I just read a little of it. When you been hauled in by the cops as many times as I have, you get real good at reading upside down. I know you saw her at the Lifeway Monday morning too.”

Reading upside down. One more skill Sally hadn’t yet thought about mastering. “What if I did?”

“I ain’t the only one talkin’ to Dickie these days. And that detective of his looks at you like he wants to slap you in jail a few days to keep you out of trouble.”

Bone had seen a lot more of her than she had of him, at the Wrangler as well as the rodeo, and where else? Wood’s Hole? Taco John’s? Was he stalking her? Had he taken the opportunity to slip out Tuesday night and pay a visit to her house while she was watching Marsh Carhart display his bad barroom manners? “Why are you following me around?”

“Let’s say I got an interest in finding out anything anybody knows about Monette. And let’s put it this way—if I seen what you’re up to, and me not half lookin’, whoever pushed you into that chute must be at least a step ahead of me.”

Gosh, that was a comforting thought.

Sally considered her options. Bone was vile, but he wasn’t stupid. Right now he was trying to convince her, in his weird way, that he wasn’t the murderer. If this whole conversation was a bluff, and he’d killed Monette, there was no point accusing him. It could lead to Sally ending up prematurely dead. If he hadn’t murdered his daughter, somebody else, a person who meant Sally no good, had. She had nothing to lose by talking to him. “An interest. What kind of interest?”

Bone turned his head and gazed at the sky. When he looked back at her, his eyes were as mean and crafty as ever. “Maybe one I could take to the bank.”

“Are you saying that you think Monette had some money stashed somewhere? Why would you think that?”

“I told you before. When I called her, she told me to get lost and said she was in tall cotton. I got to thinkin’ about that, and last Sunday I went down to the Lifeway and let her know she better tell me what she thought she was doin’, blowin’ off her old man that way.”

“Yeah, Bone. I bet you let her know.”

“Damn right. And what she said was, she didn’t need nothin’ from me no more. She’d got herself into something sweet and she didn’t want me comin’ around, tryin’ to get a piece of it,” Bone said bitterly. He fished for another cigarette.

“Do you have any idea what she was talking about?” Sally asked.

A pause while Bone replenished his supply of toxic gases, noxious chemicals, and heavy metals. He scratched his scalp, shook his head. “Monette always thought she’d get herself a cowboy one day, and ride away.”

“You think she had a boyfriend?” It couldn’t be Adolph Schwink. Nobody would ever consider a produce clerk a one-man gold mine.

“Hell no,” said Bone. “Can you imagine any guy with eyes in his head wanting a sloppy little dog-face piece like Monette for anything more than a quickie behind the barn?”

Nothing like paternal affection. Or spousal devotion. Nope: nothing at all. Imagine being Tanya Nagy Bandy, or Monette Bandy, and living with that. Sally closed her eyes and sighed. “Okay, Bone. What are you trying to tell me?”