Owl Dreams

by John T. Biggs

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Every cubic centimeter of Archie literally screamed, “I am an Apache warrior.” From the maternal nucleic acids in his mitochondria to the stone-cold-killer look in his dark brown eyes, the man was quintessential renegade.

  “Being civilized makes people afraid to die,” he told Sarah.

  “Afraid you’re going to kill them.” She adjusted his collar, brushed a few stray hairs off of his shoulders. As if those things could make a difference. Sarah made a slow circuit around Archie, appraising him from every angle. “Still scary.” No amount of fiddling was going to change that.

  Archie Chatto’s hair was trimmed and neatly parted. He wore a Tommy Bahama Hawaiian style shirt with its tail flowing casually over his Arizona Jeans. His hands were clean. His nails were more or less manicured. Archie was parole board pretty, but he would never pass for a peaceful, law-abiding member of society. He was a pit bull on the way to a dogfight, and dressing him in discount store fashions could not disguise that fact.

  “You won’t fool the Choctaw,” Sarah told him. “They don’t have two hundred years of white guilt dimming their vision.”

  “They’ll talk to me.” When Archie asked questions, people told him things. Maybe they didn’t tell him everything. Maybe they told him little white lies. But they told him something, even if they had Indian ways.

  Sarah handed him a picture of Marie. He kissed it gently and placed it in his shirt pocket. She gave him a Xerox copy of Hashilli Maytubby’s driver’s license. He glared at it and stuck it in the back pocket of his jeans.

  “Next to my ass,” he said. “Where he belongs.”

  “People call the police when they’re afraid.”

  Archie smiled at Sarah’s naiveté. Indians wouldn’t call the cops because a dangerous-looking man was in the neighborhood. Indians were slow to bring the authorities into their lives, even the Civilized

  Tribes. “If they know anything about Marie, they’ll tell me.” Hashilli was another matter. He might be a cousin or an uncle. They wouldn’t talk about a relative to a stranger. Not the first time they were asked.

  “If they hold back, I’ll shake the truth out of them,” Archie said. That wouldn’t be too hard. They’d start shaking the moment he walked into the room. Like Chihuahuas in the presence of a wolf.

  Archie made the grand tour of Choctaw country without incident. No one took him to task when he checked out the tribal hospice program in Bryan County. Likewise at the smoke shops in Pocola, Durant, Hugo and Arrowhead. When he visited community centers in Bethel, Antlers, and Broken Bow, the administrative staffs were cordial and cooperative. Workers at the trailer manufacturing facility in Choctaw were equally obliging.

  Archie got some funny looks when he brought urine samples to the tribe’s corporate drug testing service. Security guards at Blue Ribbon Downs racetrack made him walk through a metal detector, but if anyone called the police he never heard about it.

  He visited patients at the Choctaw Nation Health Care Center at Talihina without triggering alarms. He made his way to eight different tribal clinics seeking information about HIV testing (anonymously, of course). He questioned strangers in the streets in Durant and Valiant. Conversations always ended the same way. “Never heard of a Choctaw named Hashilli. Good luck finding the woman.” No hesitation. No signs of deception. No flashing lights or sirens.

  Damn!

  It wasn’t until Archie visited a dental office in Coalgate that he came to the attention of the police. Hashilli’s Mr. Luna persona was a member of a community board that funded the dental practice through a National Health Service grant.

  Archie knew Hashilli hadn’t stashed Marie inside a dental office, but he followed the lead anyway. Maybe the hygienist had cleaned Mr. Luna’s teeth. Maybe Marie came in with a lost filling. Anything was possible. His expectations were low, and so was his mood when he walked up to the receptionist. He had a pained expression on his face, but he did not act like a man with a toothache.

  The young woman behind the counter greeted Archie with an insincere smile. She spoke the crisp colorless accent of a television newsreader. No trace of Choctaw Country dialect. The streaks of gold highlighting the symmetrical curls of her honey-blonde hair suggested hours spent in a salon in Tulsa or Oklahoma City. Her nametag identified her as “Laurie.” The name was underlined with a question written in all caps. HOW MAY I HELP YOU?

  Archie pegged her as a grant item borrowed from an urban area to grease the wheels of a start up dental practice that probably had to beat patients off with a stick. He showed her a Xerox copy of Hashilli’s picture.

  “This guy ever come around?”

  It took the girl a few seconds to shift her eyes away from the jailhouse skin graffiti that decorated the backs of Archie’s hands and traveled all the way up both arms until it disappeared underneath the sleeves of his aloha shirt. She had been in Coalgate long enough to know that Archie wasn’t Choctaw. Not Creek or Cherokee or Chickasaw or Seminole, either. None of the Civilized tribes would claim him as a member.

  Archie offered Laurie a convincing smile and redirected her attention to Hashilli’s picture. “He might call himself Mr. Luna, or Dr. Moon. He might be traveling with a woman.” Archie showed her Marie’s photograph.

  “Are you a policeman?”

  Silly question. Archie intensified his smile. “You might say I’m involved with law enforcement.” He shoved Marie’s photograph at Laurie. “How about this woman?”

  The receptionist took the photograph in both hands. She studied it carefully, the way a thief might evaluate the contents of a collection plate during Sunday services.

  “Well, Laurie, have you seen her?”

  The girl followed Archie’s line of vision to her nametag. She covered it with her hand, a moment too late.

  “Sorry, sir.” Laurie placed the photo on the counter so her hands and Archie’s would not be touching it at the same time.

  A trouble-front moved through the waiting room. Archie recognized the signs. Mothers put down their People Magazines. Little girls hid Barbie dolls behind their backs. Little boys stopped making action figures talk. The world within the dental office went deadly quiet. Even the background noise of dental drills and high volume suction apparatus disappeared.

  Archie’s eyes drifted to the glass cover on a record cabinet behind Laurie. The reflection of flashing red and blue lights obscured a section labeled “Recall Patients.”

  Archie didn’t think anyone in the office had called the police, but he’d been asking questions about Marie and Hashilli all over Choctaw country. People in small towns would notice him, and the police would eventually take interest.

  Curious cops generally arrest someone, that was Archie’s experience. They took suspicious people into custody and held them until their curiosity was satisfied. When they were wrong, the injured party got an apology, sometimes even a legal settlement. The problem was, the cops were seldom wrong. They were never wrong in Archie’s case.

  No point in speculation, no point in flashing a fake ID and pretending innocence. Men like Archie Chatto never invoked the traditional greeting offered by solid citizens to police officers everywhere: “Is there a problem, officer?” The cops knew there was a problem as soon as they got a look at him.

  Archie placed the photograph of Marie in his shirt pocket and asked Laurie the one question he knew she dared not refuse: “Okay if I use the toilet?”

  Laurie winced at the proper English word for the facility. “The patient restroom is occupied, but if it’s urgent . . . .”

  “Ain’t it always urgent?”

  Laurie directed Archie to the restroom in the doctor’s office. Every doctor’s office Archie had ever seen had a back way out. If he could slip away before the police identified him he could disappear. Apache warriors had been doing things like that for a thousand years.

  Local cops were territorial; they wouldn’t call state troopers into the search, at least not right away. The Coa
l County deputies would find the pickup truck he’d borrowed in Atoka and would assume he was a hapless car thief with a dental problem. It probably happened all the time.

  The dentist had an escape route all right. Archie eased the back door open an eighth of an inch and surveyed the rear parking lot.

  Damn, even Coal County cops travel in pairs. In the old days, before the tribes grew fat from gambling money, rural counties had not been so affluent.

  A sheriff’s deputy had taken a position at the rear of the parking lot. His eyes scanned the back of the building while his hand unfastened the snap on his sidearm holster.

  Plan B. Archie opened the door to the doctor’s private restroom. It was tiny, not suitable for persons with disabilities. It probably violated code, but for Archie Chatto’s purposes it was perfect. He climbed onto the cheap laminated vanity with no concern for the footprints he left behind. He lifted a large section of acoustic tile and looked into the space between the ceiling and the roof of the building. The metal framework suspending the tiles was sturdy. Archie thought it would hold a man’s weight, but only if the man was very careful.

  Tom Leflore had been a policeman for almost a decade now, and this was his first opportunity to chase down a real live felon. He’d studied tapes from the security cameras at the Choctaw clinic in Atoka, and he was certain the notorious cop killer and escaped prisoner, Archie Chatto, was in the area. Spotting his cousin’s pickup truck in the dental office parking lot was a stroke of luck. A quick call to cousin Billy confirmed the truck was missing. At the very least, Tom would make an auto theft arrest and firm up his value as an indispensable family resource. In the best of all possible worlds, Archie Chatto would be the car thief, and Tom would make a first class felony bust that would cinch his bid for County Sheriff in the next election.

  Tom introduced himself to the cute little office manager from Tulsa. He knew her name already. Getting acquainted with new people was an important part of the job, especially when new people were as pretty as Laurie Tremble. She looked just like a movie star, and she talked like one too. Exactly the kind of girl he wanted to protect and serve. He’d take her statement later, after the excitement was over. At the Brandin’ Iron Café. No one would notice a couple of porterhouse steaks charged to the county.

  “He’s in the doctor’s office,” Laurie told him. “I knew there was something funny about that man as soon as he walked through the door.”

  Patients started leaving as soon as Tom Leflore asked his first question. He told Laurie she should leave as well. “We need to clear the building, in case there’s trouble.” He’d waited ten years to say those words.

  The pretty receptionist smiled at him. She pulled shoulders back and made a point of straightening her nametag so Tom would have a good excuse to look at her breasts. He tried not to move his lips as he read the all-caps question under her name, “HOW MAY I HELP YOU?” It was a fine day to be in law enforcement.

  If the deputy lived in an urban center like Oklahoma City or Tulsa or even Muskogee, he’d call for back up, but all the backup he had was standing out in the rear parking lot hoping to get a chance to use the 9 mm Browning automatic the county had just bought him. The boy was trigger-happy, no doubt about it. Hopefully he wouldn’t kill their suspect before they made a proper identification. It would be a shame to take a man’s life over a fifteen-year-old pickup truck with a blue book value less than $1200. But if the suspect turned out to be the cop killer, then restraint could be applied in moderation. Tom hoped to squeeze off a shot or two himself, now that all the innocent bystanders had cleared out.

  He opened the door to the doctor’s office. Took stock of its contents. There was a built-in desk and a couple of office chairs like the ones on sale at Sam’s Club. There was a laptop computer, a pile of insurance papers, a stack of throwaway journals, and the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. The girl on the cover looked interesting, like evidence. He’d confiscate the magazine later and look at it down at the station.

  The bathroom door was shut, and Tom figured that was where he’d find his suspect, taking one last crap before being hauled off to the Coal County Jail.

  It would have been nice to kick the door in, but fixing it would be an unnecessary cost to the department, and besides, it opened outward. A good solid kick would not only wreck the door, it would break or dislocate the frame. As difficult as it was to find a carpenter around Coalgate, it might take several weeks before doctor could take a leak in private.

  He held his side arm in his right hand and tried the bathroom door with his left.

  Unlocked.

  It didn’t take Columbo to figure out the suspect’s plan of escape. Tom could see the set of footprints on the vanity, and one of the acoustic tiles was out of place. That’s the way it was with lawbreakers. They weren’t all that clever when it came to getting away.

  Tom hefted himself onto the vanity, detached the flashlight from his utility belt, lifted the acoustic tile, and peered into the space between the ceiling and the roof. It was a perfect rectangle. Like most dental offices, this one was built to order like a cracker box without a single feature of architectural interest. Complete efficiency with no esthetic nooks and crannies. Heating and air-conditioning ducts offered some cover. Other than that, his fugitive had no place to hide.

  Unless he finds a way onto the roof, Tom realized, I’ve got the bastard. He thought he saw a little movement behind the big duct that delivered regulated air to the waiting room. No trap doors that he could see leading to the exterior, no reason at all to alert his partner. This criminal was his.

  For a moment he considered the words of his old football coach. “There is no ‘I’ in Team.” But Tom Leflore wasn’t playing football now; he was laying the groundwork for a career in law enforcement. There was no “I” in that either, but what the hell.

  As soon as Archie heard the deputy crawl into the space above the drop ceiling, he shoved the doctor’s office chair aside and crawled out from the little cavern in the built-in desk that was big enough to comfortably house a pair of casually crossed legs, but barely large enough to hide a man.

  He removed the casters from the doctor’s chair. He eased the bathroom door closed, and wedged the back of the chair under the doorknob. Cheap, low pile carpet covered the cement slab in the doctor’s private office. That would stabilize the chair’s rear legs for a while. Not as secure as Archie would like, but enough to slow the cop down if he followed the natural inclination to leave the ceiling space the same way he had entered it.

  How long would it take the deputy to figure out he’d been outsmarted? Archie hoped it would be long enough for him to disappear out the front door. He could be long gone by the time the deputy got his feet back on the ground and explained his lapse in judgment to his partner.

  One of the acoustic tiles bulged out and cracked, scattering chunks of sound-absorbing foam over the reception area. A khaki uniformed leg protruded through the ceiling and was quickly withdrawn. Curse words and the crackle of a two way radio accompanied the thumps and bumps of the officer as he completed his futile search.

  Archie left the building just as Deputy Leflore’s partner kicked in the rear door. A series of gunshots followed. It wasn’t really Archie’s fault if the cop on the floor and the cop in the ceiling had a gunfight based on miscommunications, but he knew a grand jury wouldn’t see it that way.

  Felony murder. That would be one more charge added to his already massive legal record. He made his way to the police car and radioed for help.

  “Officer down!” He recited the address of the dental clinic, even though it was the only dental clinic in town, and everyone knew exactly how to find it.

  “Dispatch an ambulance, stat!”

  The origin of Archie’s distress call would remain a mystery in Coal County for years to come. Some of the locals would believe a neighbor made the call after investigating the source of gunshots. Others would claim it was the ghost of a long dead Federal Mar
shal who had been killed over a century ago while pursuing bandits in Indian Territory—still on duty after all these years.

  No one would speculate the call had been made by career criminal and confessed cop killer, Archie Chatto. It would be inconceivable that a renegade Apache could show that depth of compassion.