Chump Change

by G. M. Ford

  She dropped her voice to a conspiratorial level.

  “Out at the Moon place. They throw these parties. First Wednesday night of the month. Invite every business owner in town. Spend all night rubbin elbows with ‘the little people.’ Fill em up with cheap champagne and little catered crackers and the like. Got all of em bamboozled into thinking it’s gonna be a bright new day for Lewiston.”

  “I take it you don’t attend.”

  “Rather be pounded flat with a mallet.”

  “They got one planned for this month?” I asked.

  “Tomorrow night. Why?”

  “Maybe we ought to try out a few of those crackers.”

  She was slightly taken aback, but quick on the trigger.

  “We?” she asked.

  “I didn’t get an invite,” I said. “I’d need to go as somebody’s date.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “You are a troublemaker, aren’t you?”

  “Just trying to satisfy that pesky curiosity of mine,” I said.

  “They’ll faint dead, they see me out there,” she said with a crooked smile.

  “It’s a date then.”

  She laughed. Looked at me with slanted eyes. “Starts at seven,” she said. “You’re gonna need a jacket.”

  “I’ll find one.”

  Across the room, Ginny and Keith were hanging on one another’s every word, with a bright-eyed intensity available only to the young and only for a while. Guy could make a bazillion bucks if he figured out how to make it last . . . how to bottle that first wave of attraction and spread it out over a lifetime, making every encounter magical, and every conversation meaningful. The more I thought about it, the more exhausting it sounded.

  Irene got to her feet. Tucked the blue bank bag under her arm.

  “Gonna run this by the ATM,” she said.

  She looked out over my head and raised her eyebrows. I swiveled and looked back over my shoulder. Ginny and Keith were walking our way.

  Keith spoke up first. “Ginny’s gonna give me a ride back to . . . you know . . . the motel . . . later on.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “We’re ready for morning,” Ginny announced to her mother. The girl’s sumptuous upper lip was creased in an odd manner, as if she’d just heard a funny story and was trying not to laugh. Irene immediately picked up on whatever the message was.

  “See you then,” she said, distractedly.

  We watched in silence as they sauntered out the door, hand in hand.

  The door tinkled. Irene heaved an audible sigh.

  “She always looks at me that way when she’s about to get laid,” she said.

  They’d moved Olley Hardvigsen from the ICU to the Critical Care Unit. Whatever the hell that meant. I knew she’d be there. No way Sarah Jane was going back home without him. Made me wonder if I’d ever been or ever would be that attached to anyone or anything. I had a suspicion I wouldn’t much like the answer.

  I followed the signs to the waiting room, and there she was. Sitting ramrod straight in the chair closest to the nurses’ station. The chair next to her was occupied by a short, stout fellow with long gray hair. He held a ten-gallon hat upturned in his lap. He looked my way as I entered the room. An Indian, for sure.

  “How’s he doing?” I asked Sarah Jane.

  “Better,” she said. “Docs say he’s gonna be okay.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  She turned toward her companion. “This is one of the men I was telling you about, Herbert.”

  Herbert got to his feet and offered a hand. “Herbert Lean Elk,” he said.

  I shook his hand and introduced myself.

  “Herbert’s chairman of the Nez Perce Tribal Council,” Sarah Jane said.

  “Former,” he corrected. “They put me out to pasture a couple months back. Named me an elder of the tribe.”

  “Quite an honor,” I said.

  “It’s the lifetime achievement award,” he said. “Made me feel like I’d died.”

  We were interrupted by the squeak of rubber-soled shoes moving in our direction.

  Female doctor. Blue scrubs. “Mrs. Hardvigsen,” she said.

  “That’s me,” Sarah Jane said.

  “Your husband’s awake and would like to see you.”

  Sarah Jane lit up like a Christmas tree.

  “Good people,” Herbert said as the women hustled off.

  “Under a lot of pressure,” I said.

  “Olley’s great-granddaddy Titus . . . Titus shot my great-uncle Ned, way back when.”

  “Shot him?”

  “Dispute over an antelope carcass.” He shrugged. “Or so they say.”

  “Kill him?”

  Herbert shook his head. “No . . . but they say Ned never walked quite right again.”

  As the women disappeared around a corner, Herbert returned to his chair and sat down. “They gonna lose the ranch,” he said, sadly.

  “For sure?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Can’t run the place on their own. Can’t afford help. Hell . . . I had to send half a dozen guys out there today, out of my own pocket, just to feed the stock. The Boys left a lot of forage out for the animals. Probably last em for a few days, but a cattle ranch don’t run itself. Gotta be somebody there full-time.”

  “Keeler gonna end up with it?” I inquired.

  He pursed his lips. “Probably.”

  “Why doesn’t the tribe buy it?”

  “Can’t,” he said. “Federal law won’t let us. Says the boundaries of the reservation are not subject to modification, because we’re technically a sovereign nation. Changing the boundaries would be—you know, technically anyway—an act of war. Might cost us our sovereignty status.” He waved a disgusted hand. “Weren’t for that, we would.” He looked down the hall. “Sarah Jane and Olley’d sure rather we had it than those damn Keeler people.”

  He got to his feet. Put his hat on his head. “Tell Sarah Jane I said bye. I live way the hell over in Bundy. Gotta be back over here for the environmental impact thing first thing in the morning.”

  I got to my feet. “Nice meeting you,” I said.

  “Thanks for helping out with Olley,” he said. “He’s a better man than most.”

  We shook hands again, and then I stood and watched as he walked to the end of the hallway, stepped into the elevator, and disappeared from view.

  It was twenty minutes before Sarah Jane reappeared. Whatever joy she’d left with had evaporated. She dropped dejectedly into the seat next to me.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  “He drifts in and out,” she said. “They say he’s gonna have to stay in here.”

  “How long?”

  “Coupla weeks . . . at least.” She ran those steely blue eyes over me. “Gonna take the rest of what money we got just to pay the bill.”

  “Herbert said your animals would be all right for a few days.”

  She sighed. “What then?” she said as much to herself as to me. “There’s chores gotta be done. Who’s gonna do em?”

  I didn’t have an answer, so I kept my mouth shut.

  “Give you a ride back to the ranch?” I asked, after a while.

  She straightened in the chair. “Thanks . . . but no.”

  I got to my feet. “I’ll check back in the morning,” I said.

  Her mouth moved two-doors-down from a smile. “I’m appreciative for everything you and your young friend done, but there’s no need to be . . .”

  I cut her off. “See you tomorrow,” I said.

  Wasn’t until you got to places like this that you remembered how many stars there were in the sky. A city creates its own Milky Way, its own sundown and sunrise, a glow so steady and bright you can’t see anything but the brightest of the stars.

  But here . . . here the sky was a gleaming carpet. Thousands upon thousands of glittering bodies, all swirled together like some great celestial cake.

  If I hadn’t been standing next to the Blazer, gazing up at the sky like Bill Nye t
he Science Guy, I probably would never have caught the flash of movement in my peripheral vision. A red streak crossing the alley on the other side of the street dropped my attention to the terrestrial plane.

  I stayed where I was, one eye on the sky, the other hoping to catch another flash of red . . . something to tell me I wasn’t just being paranoid, but it didn’t come, so I hopped into the car and started her up. I threw the Blazer into gear and rolled out of the hospital parking lot, under a blanket of cosmic luminescence.

  All the way back to the motel, I couldn’t quite make up my mind whether somebody was dogging me or not. Thought maybe I caught sight of a shadow a couple of times, but at that point, I’d had just about all the confrontation I could take for one day, and decided not to press the issue.

  I still had that prickly feeling on the back of my neck as I parked the Blazer out in the middle of the Holiday Inn parking lot and walked around to the rear. The parking space directly in front of my room was empty, but on the off chance that the car attracted any unwanted attention, I preferred not to be quite so up close and personal.

  I folded up the carpet, removed the spare-tire insert, and pulled out two athletic bags. The smaller purple bag with the Washington Husky on the side contained an old-fashioned .38 snub-nosed revolver. A super-reliable weapon, as old as I was, but with enough stopping power to be dangerous at close quarters. Nestled in the bottom of the bag was a much newer Glock G17 automatic, and enough 9mm Parabellum ammo to start a war in the Balkans.

  And that was just the short stuff. The larger of the two bags, the black one with the enormous Nike swoosh running its length, was originally intended to carry either tennis rackets or baseball bats. I wasn’t sure which. Be that as it may, however, it had plenty of space for the AX9 assault rifle and sufficient .223 ammunition to finish any Central European wars the Glock started.

  I lugged them over to the driver’s door, locked up, and set the alarm system to remote. That way, the system would buzz my keychain fob, rather than setting the horn to blowing and waking up everybody in a six-block area. Had I been in the city, I wouldn’t have bothered with the alarm at all. In Seattle, your car alarm could sound for a week and a half and nobody would pay any attention. Car alarms had become like urban crickets, just part of the background noise. Out here . . . who knew?

  I stashed the weaponry in the closet, grabbed the white plastic bucket, and followed the arrows to the ice machine. Armed with a fresh bucket of ice and three Mountain Dews, I found my way back to number 103, where I made sure of the shades and the locks, and then snapped on the TV. Walter White. Breaking Bad. Yet another feather in American education’s cap.

  I slid the assault rifle under the bed. Opened the Husky bag, took out the .38 and a box of shells. I loaded six into the cylinder, put the rest back in the bag, and stuck it under the bed with the serious armament.

  Wasn’t until I’d been sitting there staring at the boob tube for a half hour, Mountain Dew in one hand, .38 in the other, that I realized how tired I was.

  I sat up, put my feet on the floor, and yawned. I was starting to feel a bit foolish sitting there holding a gun in an empty room, so I checked the safety again and set it on the nightstand. My eyes caught sight of Keith’s bag, still sitting in the middle of his bed, unopened. Keith had had a better offer. I felt a twinge of jealousy, and I called Rachel.

  “Hey,” I said when she picked up.

  “Hey yourself. How’s it going?”

  “Interesting,” I said.

  “How so?”

  I thought about it. “Seems like Gordy was neither highly regarded nor long remembered in his own hometown.”

  “Not surprising.”

  “I had to tell his mother he was dead,” I said.

  “Hard, huh?”

  “Yeah . . . and you know what?” I asked finally.

  “What?”

  “She never once asked what happened to all that money.”

  “For some people, it’s not about money.”

  “But thirteen million bucks?”

  “Some people just don’t give a damn,” she said.

  I tried to process the notion, but just couldn’t tamp it down.

  “You come up with any ideas of your own on the subject?” she asked.

  I mulled it.

  “Yeah . . . I believe I may have,” I said finally. “I’m not sure exactly who’s involved or exactly how they did it, but I think somebody desperate for a big influx of cash saw that big ol lummox with all that money and decided he was such a rube they could take it from him. All they needed was the right bait.”

  “Missy Allen.”

  “She never even broke a sweat.”

  “Men are easy that way.”

  I was about to agree when my keychain began to buzz in my pocket. First vibration I thought maybe was just the user-friendly excitement of talking to Rachel. Second one made things clear. Somebody was messing with the Blazer.

  “Gotta go,” I said quickly, and broke the connection.

  I snapped off the TV and the lights, grabbed the room key and the .38, and slipped outside. I bent below the level of the parked cars and hustled up to the corner of the L-shaped wing, so I could approach the car at an unexpected angle.

  I duckwalked past one row of parked cars, and peeped around the side of a white Subaru wagon. There were two of them. Neither of them built like Dexter. One had his head stuck in the door and was rummaging around in the glove box. The other was all the way inside the car, kneeling on the rear seat, leaning over, going through the luggage compartment.

  In the movies, this is where the hero pulls his gun and gets the drop on the bad guys. In real life, however, brandishing a weapon you’re not prepared to use can get you killed in a heartbeat. Since I figured shooting car prowlers was probably frowned upon in Idaho, I left the .38 in the waistband of my jeans and rose to my full height.

  “You boys looking for something?”

  Freeze tag. Neither of them so much as twitched. These weren’t amateurs.

  I had most of the Subaru between us. They couldn’t see my hands, which made them real slow and cautious as they crawled back outside the car. Both wearing dark jackets and wool watch caps. The nearest one took two steps in my direction.

  I put my hand on the .38. He stopped moving.

  “You don’t want to come this way,” I assured him.

  He took another step.

  “Man’s got a right to defend himself,” I cautioned.

  The other one said something I couldn’t make out, and then they both began to back away from me, keeping their hands in sight and their eyes glued on me.

  I waited until I heard car doors closing and the chirp of tires before I stepped out from behind the Subaru.

  They hadn’t broken anything getting in, which told me for a second time they were probably pros. It took five minutes for me to put the Blazer back in order. This time, when I locked up, I set the alarm for maximum commotion. Not waking my neighbors suddenly didn’t seem nearly as important as it had earlier in the evening.

  When Keith stumbled in at quarter to four, I was still up and still armed.

  No crack of dawn for us. It was the better part of eleven in the morning before Keith and I rolled out of bed, found our way to the shower, and then stumbled out the door. I was having trouble waking up. He was having trouble keeping a silly-ass smile from spreading all over his face.

  I was consoling myself with a cup of McDonald’s coffee as we pulled to a stop at the big billboard. FUTURE HOME OF THE WORLD FAMOUS EAGLE TALON CASINO AND LODGE. WHERE DREAMS BEGIN. I tried to wrap my head around the question of how something that wasn’t built yet could already be famous, but quickly wearied of the task.

  Out in front of the Blazer, a brand-new blacktop road rolled over and around the hills, for as far as the eye could see. Someone had pulled back the galvanized gate and propped it open with a good-sized rock.

  I once again demonstrated my keen perception of the obvious.r />
  “Gate’s open,” I said.

  “So . . .” Keith looked around. “So . . . other than the three NO TRESPASSING signs, the POSTED KEEP OUT sign, and the one over there that promises to prosecute violators to the fullest extent of the law . . . you figure this’ll be okay.”

  I dropped the car into gear. “No problem,” I assured him, as we rolled over the cattle guard and started down the road.

  Funny how long that ten miles seemed. I figured it must have been the new unmarked road and the fact that there was absolutely nothing in the distance for the eye to fix on. Seemed like we’d been driving for an hour before we finally crested a ridge and found ourselves looking down at the future home of the world-famous Eagle Talon Casino and Lodge, however the hell that worked.

  Coupla-hundred-acre bluff overlooking the Snake River. A thousand wooden stakes pounded into the ground all over the place. Red stakes, white stakes, yellow stakes, stakes with pink ribbons nailed to the top. All marking where this or that was someday going to be located.

  Uphill to the south was The Flying H. Part of a barn roof was visible from where we sat. You could sure see how having your own airport right there would be a big-time game changer. No four-lane blacktop. No buses. No nothing. Just fly em in, fleece em, and fly em out. No muss, no fuss, no bother.

  The world is divided into two kinds of people: those who believe in the two-kinds-of-people theory and those who don’t. In this case, the humans had divided themselves into three groups. Out in the middle of the site, four logoed SUVs stood next to a dozen men wearing matching yellow hard hats. Hadda be the EPA, I figured, diligently protecting our environment from despoilers. My sleep-deprived brain immediately began to wonder what the hard hats were for—other than, say, random space debris—but that line of inquiry made my head hurt, so I stopped.

  Over on the far side of the bluff, closest to the river, was the Indian contingent. Musta been ten of them. Everybody with long hair and a lawn chair. They’d started a fire and were sitting around warming themselves. I recognized Herbert Lean Elk’s hat and jacket among the indigenous crowd. The old man was leaning back in the chair with his feet up on a rock, using his hands to help him hold forth on some subject or other.