Widow Town (6 page)

Gray ran through the morning sunlight that cut between the trees in flashing blades.

His breathing came easy, a normal rhythm in time with the crunch of his shoes on the dirt drive. After a mile he crested a rise that overlooked a pasture, once housing a small herd of cattle long since departed. The sun was beginning to peek over the trees, its orange head angry at the moisture dotting leaves and blades of grass alike. It rose higher, leaching the grou
nd of the night’s rain. Drying. Dry.

Gray turned and ran back the way he’d come, not seeing anything on the jog home but the road before him, long and dusty. A layer of grimy sweat covered his body when he stopped before the door to the house. He took a deep breath in, held it, let it out.
The scent of smoke hung in the air, but not smoke, it was the frying of the land giving up any and all water that it tried to hide from the burning orb in the sky.

He
ate a light breakfast, showered, and poured a travel mug full of steaming coffee before leaving the house. He sat in the cruiser, watched the door to the garage close in front of his bumper and called the station.

“
Morning, Sheriff,” Mary Jo answered.

“Hey
, Mary Jo, any calls last night?”

“A few came in with concerns to the automated system but the service didn’t hear any distress in the calle
r’s voices so none woke me up.”

“Restful night.”

“Not really.”

“Anything new on the radar?”

“Nothing yet, Thueson and Monty didn’t have anything this morning. Monty said he patrolled past the Jacobses’ farm several times and scoped the place but there was nothing.”

“
All right.”

“You coming in this morning?”

“Not right away. Tell Joseph to do his usual patrols and I’ll call him when I’m in.”

“Will do,
Sheriff.”

Gray ended the call and tapped his thigh onc
e, noting the little bulge where the screw sat, still encased in its plastic bag. After taking a long swallow of coffee, he put the cruiser into gear and drove down the road slowly as to not raise too much dust.

Two hours
later he slowed the vehicle to a crawl along the baking tar road heading north out of Shillings. The wind came in gasps and sputters that rocked the cruiser on its springs, the open field of bleached weeds rolling like a brown tide on his left. To the right a dense patch of forest swayed in time. The very ends of the leaves turning an alarming yellow, the roots without even a taste of the night’s rain.

Gray inched along the deserted road, heat mirages swirling before and behind the car. The drive he looked for was so well hidden, he sometimes still
rolled by it on accident, only seeing the sign after he’d passed. A bit of interlaced brush opened on the right and a small sign, suspended over a narrow trail, swung in the gusts. The
M
in
metallurgist
was almost worn away, he’d have to tell Danzig that it wouldn’t do to have a steel sign proclaiming his own profession fading with time.

Gray spun the wheel and drove through a tunnel of trees, their branches interlocked so well only fleeting shafts of light fell on the trail. The road rose and fell before curving past and over a
streambed holding nothing but stones and dried sticks abandoned by the water that carried them there. A bit of grass hissed against the undercarriage and then the car rose out of a dip and rolled past a three story house set in an enormous clearing. The house had a haunted look with rounded windows and a turret gracing one corner that rose a story higher than the rest of the roof and ended in an observatory. Three steel buildings stood in a line past the home, their sides a stale green. A stack of steel billets sat beneath the first building’s long overhang where the nonexistent rain couldn’t reach. The lawn looked recently mowed.

Nothing moved.

Gray parked the cruiser between the first steel building and the house before climbing out into the rising heat of the day. The clack of dry branches and hush of dying leaves were the only sounds. As he approached the building a wide man-door opened and a shadow filled the other side, blocking the glow of high-powered lights.

“Did you bring any booze with you?” The shadow said.

Gray stopped, cocked his head toward the tree line where the sun still hid. “Did I somehow lose about six hours of time, or is it still before noon?”

Danzig Sheppard stepped out of the building, instinctually ducking his head even though the doo
r had been cut to fit his bulk.

The man
was a mountain of muscle.

His shoulders were barely concealed beneath a
sweat-stained T-shirt, holes gaping where a hot spark had landed. A leather apron hung down his front, its length doing nothing to hide the massive twin pectorals beneath it. He wore a pair of faded cargo shorts on his lower half, stained with grease and burn marks above black, steel-toed boots. His face was clean shaven save a trimmed goatee the same color as his dark, tightly cropped hair. A pair of welding goggles were pushed up onto his forehead, an outline of grime around his eyes where they’d sat.

“The only time you show up here before
nine in the morning is when some terrible shit has happened, and I don’t want to hear about it unless you have something to drink.”

Gray sighed and looked d
own at his feet. Kicked a rock.

“Shit, it
is bad, isn’t it?” Danzig said.

“Yeah.”

“Well, guess we’ll have to do without the booze. Come on in.”

Danzig disappeared into the building, moving with a grace not normally found in a man so large. Gray followe
d him inside and shut the door.

The air stank of oxide and grease within the workshop. Its walls were lined with shelves and pegs hung with tools of all shapes and sizes. A steel mallet, its head the size of a car tire, rested on a workbench, pitted and gouged but clean of any debris. The concrete floor looked cool, and for a moment Gray had to restrain himself from just sitting down to soak it in.
Danzig crossed to a nearby desk and returned holding an iron chair. He set it down with a clank and then jumped to a sitting position on the top of the worktable, casually shoving aside the immense hammer with one hand.

“Let’s hear it,” Danzig said.

Gray began to speak, pausing only to take a breath or watch Danzig for his reaction. He left nothing out except his theory, and when he was done he sat and stared at the far wall, a slow drip of water filling the silence where his voice had been.

D
anzig’s head had dropped and his eyes were closed. He was motionless for a long time. “I fixed a beater bar on Stan’s combine two weeks ago. He paid me more than I asked.”

Gr
ay nodded. “He was a good man.”

“His wife was just as kind as he was and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a girl
prettier that their daughter.” Danzig raised his head and now there was a watery film that covered the huge man’s eyes. “Who in their right mind would do that to them?”

“No one.”

Danzig met Gray’s gaze and then looked away. “So you think it’s finally happened.”

“Yeah.”

“And the Olsons were the first?”

“Nope, I can’t get myself to believe that they were. I think something has been
going on for a long time and no one’s caught wind of it until now.”

“But no one has
caught wind of it, have they?”

“No one but me.”

“And what did our good friend Bitchel have to say?”

Gray huffed a small laugh at Danzig’s refusal to call the neighboring county’s sheriff by anything other than his
high-school nickname. “Oh, you know him, always a team player.”

“Bullshit.”

“Yeah, bullshit is right.”

Danzig studied Gray in the harsh light. “They’re going to cruc
ify you, you know that, right?”

Gray sat forward in his chair and rubbed one of his boots across the rough floor. “
They may.”

“If you can’t prove it you’ll be out of a job at the very
least.”

“Oh ye
ah, more like run out of town.”

“You could come live with me.”

“Fuck that, you snore too loud.”

Danzig burst out laughing and Gray chuckled a little until the big man began to cough. The harsh racking filled the building as Danzig doubled over, steadying himself on the table as he slid off onto the floor. Gray stood and stepped forward to try and brace him, but Danzig waved him off, reaching for an immunizer containing a glass
vial in its compressed chamber.

“Just get me the poke over there,” he said between coughs. Gray grabbed the pneumatic deliverer and placed it in his friend’s outstretched hand. Without pausing, Danzig pressed the immunizer to his
bicep and triggered the device.

A short bark came from the steel pistol and the glass vial inside became cloudy. Danzig coughed two more times and then quieted, breathing
in three deep inhalations.

“Forgot to take one yesterday, dry weather makes me feel better than I am.”
He wheezed. “Fucking luck, right?”

“
Fucking luck.” Gray repeated the mantra and watched his friend.

“I’m just glad you didn’t go with me that day, otherwise you would’ve sucked down that pesticide from the air too
, and we’d both be giants from the ’roids,” Danzig said, tapping the immunizer once against the steel tabletop.

“We couldn’t both have been this big, how the hell wo
uld we ride anywhere together?”

Danzig let out a laugh that coalesced into a dry cough before finally quieting.

“Sorry,” Gray said.

“Don’t be, laughter’s good for the soul. Maybe it prolongs life too, give me more than the five years
the doctors did the other day.”

Gray scowled at the floor, shaking his head once.
“They’ll figure something out.”

Danzig sighed and then slapped Gray roughly on the shoulder. “
Enough of my pity party, let me see that screw.”

Gray pulled out the baggie containing the silver screw and handed it to his friend.

“Am I going to contaminate anything?”

“Nope,
I had it analyzed for DNA this morning. Nothing on it but a smudge.”

Danzig strode across his shop to another workbench that lined the wall. Although neatly organized, the bench’s top was covered with many different apparatus including a digital scale, a
row of stainless steel tongs, several curved magnets, and a wide-mouthed crucible.

Danzig set the screw down and pulled a small bottle
of clear solution away from the wall and unscrewed the top revealing an eyedropper. With a practiced twitch of his hand, he let one tear of the fluid fall onto the screw.

Nothing happened.

“Well, looks like it’s plain stainless steel. The nitric acid would’ve smoked it otherwise,” Danzig said, tweezing the screw up and holding it beneath a stream of water at a sink a few feet away. After it was washed, he brought the screw under a magnifying glass, turning it several different ways before handing it back to Gray. “Yeah, nothing special about it, you could get it in any hardware store from here to Mexico.”

“Shit,” Gray said, returning it to the plastic baggie.

“Sorry.”

“No problem. Fucking luck.”

“Yeah.” Danzig leaned on his forearms and stared at Gray. “What’s next?”

“You k
now what I’m going to ask you.”

Danzig shifted a little. “I don’t know anyone that
would do something like that.”

“But you do know some who don’t have
the Line, right?” Gray said.

“I have customers.”

“Dan, people are dead and more to follow if I don’t find the ones who did this.”

Danzig stood and grimaced, looking at the wall for a moment before answering. “Terry Yantz and his family are way off in the boonies, south on
sixty-three about five miles. You’ll see a dried up swamp on the right and then a trail narrower than mine running straight in. Follow it to the end and you’ll find them, but I can tell you right now, Terry didn’t do it. He’s got a family, he’s an intelligent man but they live simply. They stay out of the way of most people. Shit, I wouldn’t know him myself if he didn’t need hand tools repaired every so often.”

“No one knows anyone fully.”

“So you say.”

“So I know.”

Danzig’s posture relaxed and he rubbed the spot where he’d given himself the shot. “Besides interrogating an innocent man, what’s your next move?”

“I think about it all, it’s what I do best.”

“What you do best is talk.”

“Can’t argue with that.”