Bad Company (19 page)

In one corner of the home page screen was an icon of a smiling, postmillennial middle-aged babe (she looked like Sela Ward in a jogging suit, holding a spatula) and the caption, “Go Ask Alice!” Sally clicked, and was treated to advice about how to find nonsulfited red wines (answer: Go to California), what to do with salmon roe (Eat them and don’t feel guilty; farmed salmon are a dime a dozen), and what new food products were HOT (would you believe that the industry was pushing the idea of gourmet salt?). If they could make salt expensive, what next, water? Oops.

Pâté was obviously pricey, but at least it had the excuse of having been forced, by hand, into and then out of some hapless goose or luckless duck. Sally clicked on a picture of a stylized cornucopia, captioned “Alice’s Restaurant Emporium,” thinking maybe she’d order some of the costly, grayish-brown stuff Edna loved so much, and Sheldon Stover had gobbled so gauchely.

That was when her screen turned mostly white, with nothing more than the boringly typed note: URL not located on this server. And then the “fatal error message” and the stern warnings that her computer had done something not simply illegal but immoral, and she was being kicked off the Net and sent to the principal’s office.

Huh. Must have done something wrong. She powered up the browser again, got as far as the Alice’s Restaurant home page, tried the shopping link again, and once again found herself, cyberspace-speaking, out on the sidewalk with the saloon doors swinging. As they said in pâté land,
qu’est-ce que c’est
?

Alice’s place headed for Chapter 11,
peut-être
?

Then again, having found that she couldn’t get anything she wanted at Alice’s Restaurant, it might just be a bad day for Alice Wood’s website, or a good one for Sally Alder’s technophobia. When Hawk got home she’d see if he could get the site to work. Meanwhile, she found another gourmet website that promised, on a stack of Bibles, that if Sally ordered fancy French delicacies and gave them her credit card number, she’d get what she’d paid for within the week. Easy as one-two-three. Doing business with them would not enable some lurker to steal her identity, empty out Fort Knox, and pin the rap on her. At least it was improbable. Not that she was paranoid about Internet shopping or anything.

Shopping, she thought as she shut down the machine, was the least of her worries.

Chapter 17
Savoir-faire

Sally regretted the foreshortening of the Millionaires’ practice that evening. For a change, the band was really on. The drummer was hitting his marks, the fiddler had light in his fingers, and Sally and Sam were singing like their voices wanted to run off and get married. Maybe it was just time to click into gear for the Saturday gig. But whatever it was, they were cooking, in spite of the fact that Dwayne was playing in a trance. He always went into something of an altered state under the influence of music, but tonight he was plain distracted. Still, even with only half his head in the game, Dwayne was solid where the music rocked, and liquid where it rolled.

There was no small talk, about the real estate deal or anything else. There wasn’t time. They went through a dozen songs and called it a night. Consider it the last light workout before the big game—keep loose, and avoid injury. All things considered, Sally was on schedule.

The stars were out when she left Dwayne’s house, blankety thick to brighten the black, moonless sky. The air was just cool enough to make Sally’s skin tingle. Out there where Dwayne and Nattie lived, on the fat edge of town, dust still swirled and saplings were still working on growing up to be trees. But when she pulled into the garage of the house on Eighth Street and got her guitar out of the trunk, she paused on the lawn, green grass soft and cool under her feet, to listen to the bleating of the crickets and the murmur of the wind through the canopy of cottonwoods. Hawk had parked his truck out front, instead of in the driveway, so that he wouldn’t be blocking the garage. He thought of stuff like that.

But she didn’t have much time to contemplate Hawk’s thoughtfulness. A car came screeching around the corner, zoomed down the street, and just as it sped around the next bend, something exploded next to his truck.

BANG!

The smell of smoke filled her nostrils. She realized she’d hit the dirt and was crouched behind her guitar case. Yeah, that’d give her a lot of protection from a bullet or a bomb. Maybe she should have taken up the double bass.

Next thing she knew Hawk had come running out of the house, barefoot, damp hair streaming out behind him, wearing nothing but his jeans. He saw her getting to her feet and hollered, “Hey, are you okay?” When she nodded he sniffed at the smoky air and edged toward the street.

“Don’t!” she yelled. “Get back in the house!”

But by now he was walking normally, out into the street, bending down, picking up something—two things. One was an empty beer can. The other, smoldering cardboard and paper, the remains of an M-80, the kind of incendiary device sold at any of the hundred fire-works stands that opened up across the state every summer. And every summer Wyoming kids went crazy buying every conceivable device that could blow their fingers off, assail their eyesight, start fires in the forests, disturb the peace. Business was especially brisk around the Fourth of July, of course, but also during rodeo week. Goddamn kids.

The pounding of her heart felt like it would crack her chest right open. A firecracker could launch her this close to a coronary? Please.

Hawk had asked her if she was all right. Yes, damn it, she was. This was ridiculous. She couldn’t say why— maybe it had been the music, or the starry night, or possibly even Scotty Atkins’s callous insistence that she go back up to the mountains and face the devil on his home field. Stupidly, perhaps, she just wasn’t afraid anymore.

Consider, she told herself, the mighty John Elway. For all those years he’d leaned down to take snaps from center, knowing full well that the game he was playing was designed to send fully a ton of raging, steroid-crazed meat down on him the moment he said, “Hike!” And most of the time he either stood in the pocket and got the pass off, or scrambled out and avoided dismemberment. Elway had lived to win the big one, ride off into the sunset, play golf, cash checks. It was fucking inspirational.

Whoever was trying to scare the hell out of her had nothing on the Oakland Raiders. She owed it to the Langhams, and Monette, and herself to get a grip.

Hawk clearly wasn’t standing around, waiting to comfort her in her hour of weakness. He’d headed straight back inside. After a minute she picked up the guitar, squared her shoulders, and followed. Already seated at the desk, he was evidently resuming what he’d been doing before the blast in the street, frowning at the computer, a mug of chicken noodle soup cooling on the desk, a short Jim Beam in one hand and the mouse in the other. “Damn,” he said. “I can’t get this mother to serve up.”

URL not found.

And the address in the window was alices restaurant.com, with a bunch of circles and arrows on the end of it.

With all that she’d been through that day, wasn’t it nice that they were ending up on the same page? “I tried it earlier—nothing doing. I thought I might give them some business with the pâté for Edna, but they lost my sale. What do you think is going on?”

Hawk took a sip of his whiskey. “Maybe there’s a glitch in their code. Maybe it’s a problem for their web-master to solve. Or maybe you couldn’t get them to sell you anything because they aren’t selling things at the moment, due to some cash flow difficulty. As I understand it, that happens a lot in the dot.com world. Think about it—you have access to a potentially infinite pool of clients. All you have to do is write up some clever copy and put some pretty pictures up on the web. Next thing you know, you’re a household name. You don’t have to do anything as tawdry as buy actual inventory, deliver the things the people buy, collect the money that your customers owe you, or pay suppliers for the goods. Not to mention cutting paychecks for the tech support people who keep it running, the shipping clerks, the number crunchers. It wouldn’t take much heat at any point to make a cash-poor web business go up in flames.”

“You think Alice Wood is running a scam?” Sally asked.

“I don’t know. Whatever she’s up to, she’s not doing business today,” said Hawk. “It could easily be a technical screw-up. At worst, maybe she just got in a tight place. From what Molly said, her daughter wouldn’t shed any tears if she turned Wood’s Hole into cold cash. If she needs money, Alice probably figures that she might as well have her inheritance now as later.”

He set the whiskey down, logged off the web, and picked up the mug of soup. “It adds up, but maybe my arithmetic’s too simple,” he said, spooning limp noodles and salty yellow broth into his mouth. “After all, if I really had any idea how people got to be Internet millionaires, I wouldn’t be in Laramie, toting rocks and eating canned soup. I’d be sitting on my yacht in Biscayne Bay, trying to decide whether to buy a major league baseball team or take over the lingerie industry.”

He had a point. Sally and Hawk were doing pretty well for themselves, but with all the education they’d had, as smart as they were, as hard as they worked, it had occurred to them once or twice that it was a real shame they’d never figured out how to get rich.

“So,” said Sally, picking up Hawk’s glass, leaning against the desk. “Tell me about what you do know. How was your afternoon?”

Hawk ate some more soup as he thought about it. “Annoying and interesting. It was no problem getting up to the property—the road in is in decent shape. And Molly’s right—it’s a damn pretty place. A little shady and full of trees for my taste, but she’s got a perfect building site, up on a slope with a view of the red rocks out one side and the beaver pond out another. I saw a couple of deer, some black bear scat, and maybe a dozen beavers building lodges.”

He finished his soup, set down the mug, and leaned back in his chair. “Just as I was getting ready to do a thorough walk-over of the place, company showed up.”

“Let me guess,” said Sally. “Marsh Carhart.”

“For one,” Hawk said. “Sheldon Stover was with him.” Hawk chuckled and shook his head. “That guy cracks me up.”

“What were they doing there?” Sally asked.

“Carhart said he’s going to deliver his report to Nattie and Dwayne tomorrow. He hired Stover as a human resources consultant, or something like that. They were doing a final survey of the property.”

“Final?” said Sally. “Sheldon’s barely figured out that he’s not in New Jersey. What could he have to contribute?”

Hawk tilted his head. “It’s worth wondering about that. One way or another, they didn’t seem terribly surprised to see me, so I had a feeling they might have followed me up. Carhart saw me talking to Molly at the memorial for Monette—in fact, he was hovering over our table so close I thought about asking him to quit breathing all over my Frito pie. He clearly didn’t want me poking around up there, but when I told him Molly had asked me to take a look at the place, he couldn’t very well kick me off. So he offered to show me around. I wasn’t in a position to refuse.

“Not surprisingly, he made a point of emphasizing what was so great about the place. Of course he wasn’t showing me anything I hadn’t already noticed, but I couldn’t concentrate. Stover didn’t stop talking. Not even to take a breath. I think he has gills.”

“I hate to ask,” said Sally, taking the last swallow of whiskey. “What was he talking about?”

“Oh, some total crap about the impossibility of doing a study of anything except human impact on any place, because once the investigator arrived, the site was hopelessly tainted with something he called ‘ethnographic subjectivity.’ I asked him if it was contagious.”

“And what did Carhart have to say during all this?”

“Very little. Occasionally he’d nod at Stover and say something like ‘Very interesting.’ I can’t imagine what he found interesting, except maybe that trick about not breathing. Mostly Carhart just stared thoughtfully into the blue. Every once in a while he’d make some remark about what a great thing it was that there were still pockets of ‘intact ecosystems’ in the Rockies. Did you finish my drink?” he asked, scowling.

“I’ll get you a refill,” said Sally, and he followed her to the kitchen. “So, ‘intact ecosystems?’ Guess that lets us know what his impartial resource survey will reveal about the property, huh? Nattie and Dwayne must be thrilled.”

He got out another glass for her. “I can see why they would be. All you have to do is look at that beaver pond. The place appears to be thriving.”

“Appears?” she said, catching something in his voice as she dropped ice into both glasses.

Hawk smiled at her, just enough to get one dimple showing. When he smiled like that, it meant that he was entertaining ideas, often of the carnal variety. But this time it was his Mr. Science smile. She knew he was revving up for one of his famous detailed explanations. He was a reticent man by nature, but once he started in on an explanation, he talked it all the way to the finish. She poured the drinks with a lavish hand.

“It’s not that big a place,” Hawk began when they were back in the living room, sharing the couch. “We walked the perimeter in an hour and a half. As I said, it’s gorgeous, and evidently flourishing. But I kept wondering why, if the place was as good as it looked, they were leading me around. I figured there must be something they didn’t want me to see.”

“And what was it?” Sally had to ask, although she knew she’d never get Hawk to cut to the chase. For him, every explanation had its own rhythms and meanders, and there was no point being an impatient listener.

“Well,” Hawk drawled, dragging the word out for all it was worth, “it wasn’t actually on the property. But getting to it took some savoir-faire.”

“Savoir-faire?” Sally said. Make that
Monsieur
Science.

“French for ‘sneakiness.’ I decided when I first laid eyes on that beaver pond that I wanted to check out the creek they’d dammed to make the pond. I meant to follow it upstream as far as I could, off the private parcel and onto the national forest. I’d planned to hike right up the bank, but I couldn’t shake your buddies. So I decided to just play dumb, tag along with them until I got tired of it, and then announce that I was leaving. Which is what I did.”

“But of course you weren’t leaving?”

The dimpling smile again. “Nope. I got in my truck and drove back out, and then took off down a side spur and parked my truck out of sight of the main road. I hid in some bushes until I saw them drive out. And then I went back in on foot, and hiked up the creek.”

“And what,” she asked, “did you find?”

He put his glass down on the coffee table, leaned back against the arm of the couch, and hauled his legs into her lap. “About two miles upstream, the creek had been ditched. It wasn’t that much of a ditch, and it must have been a long time ago. It wasn’t a whole lot more than a kind of groove, all overgrown with grass and cluttered up with rocks and weeds, but if you know what you’re looking for, you wouldn’t miss it.”

“I would.”

“Not if you were with me,” he said. “Had to do some tough bushwhacking to follow the ditch, but finally I got to a place where there was an abandoned rail spur, and the remains of a building—the corner of an old stone foundation, some busted timbers. I walked around there for a while, trying to figure out what it was.”

“The Union Pacific Railroad was all over that country,” Sally said. “Still is.”

“Yeah, I know, but this is national forest now, and there’s no road to it. Some people have even talked about making it a wilderness area. Whatever got built came before the feds took over. I thought I’d go over to Cheyenne tomorrow and see if the state Revenue Department has any records of what might have been up there.”

The historian in Sally was intrigued. “I’ve got a little time tomorrow. I could do some digging in the archives here, see if there’s anything interesting in the railroad collections.”

“That’s my girl,” he said. “You know, what first attracted me to you was your research skills.”

“Oh yeah?” she said. “Well then, I have to confess that the thing I like best about you is your penchant for detailed explanations.”

“I thought it was my enormous . . .” he said, closing his eyes as she took his legs off her and stretched out next to him on the couch.

“Whatever,” said Sally.

“So how was your trip to Vedauwoo?” he asked.