Junkyard Dogs (20 page)

I sighed.

Vic’s voice came from behind me. “Happy Valentine’s Day.”

“A .32.” Vic sipped her coffee. “We had a contract hit in Philadelphia, where some poor bastard rode around on a SEPTA line train for eight hours before somebody figured out he was dead.”

I nodded philosophically. “When in Rome.”

Bill shrugged. “I’ll know more when I get him to Billings. The size of the barrel is usually indicated by the corona of soot, but if they used a silencer, which I’m assuming they did, the diameter might be affected.”

The conversation was bringing on another of my headaches. “Anything else?”

“The wound was pinkish in color due to carbon monoxide produced by the proximity of the weapon.”

I sipped my own coffee—it was the morning for it. “So there really isn’t any doubt that this was up close and personal.”

The young man smiled the half-smile he used when he had to tell me things I didn’t want to hear. “Not in my mind. What were the tracks like?”

“I’m bringing my expert in this morning. He was up on the Rez checking on the progress of getting his pipes thawed and trying to get permission for Cady’s wedding.”

McDermott smiled with his whole mouth. “Well, if anybody can get it done . . .”

I nodded as Dorothy brought over the pot and refilled our mugs and picked up our dishes and the detritus and debris of our food. “You three going to want anything else?”

I smiled up at her, thankful that she allowed us the back corner table for my indelicate forensic evaluations. It was not lost on me that this was the table where Ozzie and I had sat before.

Vic answered for the group. “I think we’re good.”

Dorothy set the check down between us and glanced at Bill McDermott as I picked it up. “I’d be careful, bad things happen to people who eat with this guy.”

He watched her carry the coffeepot, along with our primary and ancillary dishes, back behind the counter. “Is everybody in this county a smart-ass?”

My deputy sipped her coffee. “Pretty much.”

He studied me for a few seconds more and switched back to the subject at hand. “Often in these situations there’s a mark on the victim where the killer has held the individual while shooting them; I’ll keep an eye out for anything, but I swear it looks like somebody just walked right up to him and shot him in the heart.”

 

 

“A professional killer in northern Wyoming?”

“Doesn’t make much sense, does it?” I studied the patterns of ice frozen in the low spots of the steps as we continued up. “And why would a hired killer shoot somebody like Ozzie Dobbs?”

She didn’t say anything, probably attempting to keep as much of the warm air from the Busy Bee in her lungs until we got back to the office. She tucked her face down into the upturned fur of her jacket.

We got to the office, and I stopped.

She paused on the steps and turned to look at me through the V-shaped aperture between her collar and her ball cap. “What, you’re going for a walk? It’s fucking ten degrees below zero.”

I looked across the street at the bank sign again, which told me the exact temperature—seven degrees below zero—and time—9:05 a.m. “I need some information.”

My mother had purchased a United States Savings Bond from Durant Federal for me when I was a child, and I still did all my banking there. I had my late wife’s trust instrument for my daughter, a checking account, a savings account, and a money market account that probably now had about as much in it as the savings bond’s face value.

“Uh-oh, have we been robbed?”

Since we’d started using direct deposit a few years back, I’d hardly ever set foot in the bank itself and was a little surprised at how much it had changed. John Muecke was the president; hell, I remembered when he’d been a teller at the drive-through. He was a handsome fellow, tall and tanned, with silver hair, an easy smile, and a ready disposition.

I stuck my hand in his. “Anything you can do about that sign of yours outside? People are getting grouchy it’s been so cold.”

He smiled a smile with perfect teeth. “They should go to Belize.”

“That where you been?”

“Yeah, Michele and I have been going down there this time of the year for about three years now.” I noticed he didn’t let go of my hand. “Walt, can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure.”

He let go, and I followed him past the tellers to the back corner of the bank. His office was the one with the best view of the Bighorns and was nicely decorated with a few paintings by local artists. I sat as he shut the door behind us and came around, sitting at his desk. “Walt, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about your daughter’s trust fund.”

“Something wrong?”

“No, nothing like that; in fact, it’s doing incredibly well, especially considering the economy. I just thought it might be time to do something else with the money. Martha’s trust expires when Cady turns thirty, and I was just wondering, as one of the executors, if she might like to transfer some of the funds from that account to something different.”

“You have a branch in Belize now?”

He laughed. “No, but it’s not an insubstantial amount of money we’re discussing, and I thought perhaps with her birthday coming up, it was something we should talk about.”

“Well, you should speak to her. I don’t have anything to do with the trust, and I’d prefer to keep it that way.”

He nodded his head. “Are you aware of how much money is in the account?”

“No, and I don’t care to know. That would be Cady’s business.”

He wrote something down on the legal pad on his blotter. We sat there in silence as his look suddenly saddened. “Hey, I heard Geo Stewart passed away.”

There hadn’t been any formal announcement, but I wasn’t surprised that word had escaped in our little hamlet on the high plains. “Yep.”

“I guess the old guy finally ran out of lives.”

“Something like that.”

John leaned back in his Aero chair—it didn’t flip over like the one in my office. “Is that why you came in?”

I waited a moment, and his eyes stayed on me. “John, I need a favor.”

“Anything.”

I leaned forward. “It’s somewhat illegal.”

“Okay.”

I was expecting more of an argument but was willing to take what I was getting. “It’s going to be a matter of public record tomorrow, but for today I’d just as soon you keep it quiet. Ozzie Dobbs is also dead.”

He took a deep breath, and neither of us said anything for a few moments. “Suicide?”

“No.” I studied him. “Why would you say that?”

He stared at the blotter and waited a moment before responding. “Walter, I have to go and attend to a couple of things.” He pulled a folder from a stack at the side of his desk, the one on top, and opened it. It was thick. He held it up between us so that I could read the label at the tab, which read DOBBS. He laid the folder on his desk and stood. “Would you mind waiting here until I get back? It’ll take me about five minutes.”

I was having pretty good luck with people leaving me in rooms with open folders; so far this year I was two for two. “Okay.”

He started for the door but stopped. “Could you leave me Cady’s phone number? I think I have it but want to make sure it’s current.”

“Yep.”

He closed the door, and I leaned forward, turning the folder toward me.

 

 

“How do you get eighteen million dollars overdrawn? I go seven dollars over and the fuckers charge me thirty bucks.”

I tossed my hat onto my desk blotter. “As near as I could figure, Ozzie was using Redhills Arroyo as an investment opportunity. He’d sold a number of the development properties to partners, but sales didn’t come close to paying them back and they all brought a collective suit against him. I guess Ozzie was in the process of declaring bankruptcy.”

She leaned against my doorway. “When somebody closed his proverbial account?”

“Yep.”

She hooked a thumb into her gun belt. “Henry called and said he’d meet you over at the walking path when you got back from your eye appointment.”

I slumped a little. “Damn.”

“Forgot about that, did you?” She smiled. “Ruby said to tell you that if you don’t go, she’s quitting, too.”

 

 

I drove over to Sheridan for my eye appointment and sat in Andy Hall’s waiting room, where I read an aged issue of some outdoor magazine proclaiming our area as one of the top ten in the country for sportsmen. Yep, come on out; it’s open season on entrepreneurial junkmen and failed developers.

Andy stuck his head out a door and looked across the room at me—he is one of those guys who would always look like a young man. I figured he was approaching fifty, but he looked like he was thirty. “Walt?”

I stood and tossed the magazine on the side table. “Coming.”

“You’re limping.”

“Yep, but I don’t think it has anything to do with my eye.” I followed Andy into the examination room, took off my hat and my coat, and sat on a chair not unlike one in a barbershop, but this one had electric power. “How’s Jeannie?”

“She’s good, but I’m never letting her on a four-wheeler again.” Andy’s wife had met with an unscheduled dismount a few months back. “How’s the greatest legal mind of our time?”

“Engaged.”

His eyes stayed on me. “You like him?”

“Yep.”

He wasn’t convinced. “What’s he do?”

“He’s a cop.”

He glanced at the star on my chest. “Well, I can see how you wouldn’t like that.”

I nodded and thought about telling him about my reticence in having my daughter involved in another relationship so soon after the trouble in Philadelphia; instead, I fell back on some paternal boorishness. “You’ve got daughters; it just seems like you never stop worrying.”

“No, you don’t.” It was quiet in the room, and then the eye doctor became all business by pulling some drops from a tray on the counter. “You seem kind of tired.”

I thought about it. “It’s a case I’m working on. I was up just about all night, and it just took a turn for the worse.”

“I’m sorry.” He tilted my head back and applied the drops. “Isaac says you’re having headaches?”

“He seems to think it might have something to do with my eye.”

“Frequency and degree?”

“About once a week, but they’re not incapacitating or anything.” Like a good professional, he withheld comment. “I’m probably sitting too close to the television.”

“You don’t have a television, Walt.”

“I have an old one—it just doesn’t get any stations anymore.”

“But you still watch it?”

I nodded. “It’s soothing.”

“Sitting close to the TV doesn’t do anything to your eyes.”

“What about reading in bad light?”

“Nope.”

I gave him the horse eye. “Next thing you’ll be telling me is that carrots aren’t good for ’em, either.”

“Actually they are, but you can get vitamin A from milk, cheese, and a number of other foods, too.” He smiled and took my head in his one hand while adjusting the examination light with the long fingers of the other. “Any vision loss?”

“No more than would be normal at my age.”

He continued to study my troublesome eye. “Any double vision?”

“Sometimes when I look up.” I figured I better come clean if I was going to get anything out of the visit. “I get some flashes sometimes.”

“When?”

“When I turn my head too fast; just at the corner of my eye.”

He folded his arms and looked at me. “Let’s take a look at it and see what we’re dealing with, shall we?” He placed what looked like a miner’s light on his head and picked up a lenslike device and regrasped my head, tilting it back again. “You do have a lot of scar tissue around the orbit. Did you ever get an X-ray series done after the accident?”

“Which one?”

He shook his head at me, and the light from his forehead played back and forth across my face as he lifted my eyelid. “Which injury was it that you had when you started having these symptoms?”

“Probably the tough-man contest back in October.”

“Tough-man contest.”

“Yep, or it could’ve been from being rolled on by a horse, leg-whipped by a Vietnamese guy, pounded by a seven- foot Indian, falling off the back of a car in Philadelphia, the fight with a meth addict, or when I got frostbitten up on the mountain.” He continued to examine me with a concerned look on his face. “It’s been a busy year or so, or so Isaac Bloomfield keeps reminding me.”

He sighed and kept tilting my head at differing angles. He stopped. “Hmm . . .”

“What?”

“Well, there it is.”

“What?”

“A horseshoe tear of the retina.” He let go of my eyelid and switched off the light on his head. “The viscous liquid from the eye has already infiltrated the rip so we’ll have to use a gas bubble to lift the retina and laser it.”

I didn’t care for the sound of that. “Now?”

He took the light off and placed it on the counter behind him. “No, but we need to schedule it for tomorrow.”

“Nope.”

He looked surprised. I guess most people didn’t argue with doctors, but I did it all the time. “What do you mean, nope?”

“I’m in the middle of a homicide investigation.”

He sighed. “You know it could be misconstrued as malpractice to allow you to postpone the procedure for an entire week.”

I was firm. “My choice.”

“All right, next week; Billings or Rapid City, take your pick.”

“Next week?”

“Yes, Walt. Next week.” He smiled and continued to shake his head at me. “Let’s be clear about this—you’ve had a tear in your retina for who knows how long. Generally headaches and double vision aren’t associated with retinal tears, but those symptoms could be a result of an upglaze from an old orbital fracture and the flashes could be from a vitreous traction. Triad of symptoms for a retinal tear with subretinal fluid would generally be floaters, flashes, and curtain or veil starting to obscure the area in visual space that corresponds to the pathology.”