Bad Company

by Virginia Swift

  Monette said, “Whatever.”

  Thinking about the exchange she’d just seen, it might be a good thing for Monette to be confined to the Life-way during prime party time. Rocky Mountain rodeos always brought in more than enough of the kind of men who were looking, as the fat guy had so poetically put it, to “get a little something” from a girl witless enough to make eye contact in a bar. Monette might try to act streetwise, but Sally knew that she was only twenty-one, new in town, obviously desperate for attention, and not the brightest pixel on the screen. Sally had found the conversation she’d just witnessed disturbing, and she said nothing as Monette bagged her groceries.

  As Monette handed Sally the receipt, her eyes wandered away to the man next in line, a skinny dude with stingy eyes, sporting biker colors. “Hi there,” Monette said throatily. “Nice leather.” And then, remembering the Lifeway training manual, she turned to Sally and said, “Have a nice day.”

  “Yeah, you too,” Sally replied. And then on impulse touched Monette on the wrist and said, “And a nice week. Take care, okay?”

  But Monette had already moved on to the biker.

  Shaking her head, Sally wheeled her cartful of bags out the door. How was it possible that a girl like Monette Bandy had gotten to adulthood without developing any sense of self-protection at all? Maybe Tanya had never gotten around to telling her not to take candy from strangers. Or, as happened in too many families, maybe strangers looked like a good bet, compared to what Monette had to deal with at home. Sally didn’t really want to think about it. But she figured that next time she saw Mary and Dickie, she’d better let them know that Monette could use a little more friendly guidance from the loving auntie and uncle.

  Sally was pulling into the driveway of the house on Eighth Street just as Hawk was swinging down the front walk, his daypack bulging at the bottom, full of rocks and notebooks. College professors were supposed to have the summers off from teaching to do their own research. Sally herself had just turned in a book manuscript to her publisher, and she had the whole summer to catch up on a backlog of reading so mountainous it was nearly driving her out of her office. But Hawk Green was a geologist, so for him, summer meant spending at least half his time shepherding his grad students through the fieldwork they had to do for their theses and dissertations. Mostly he liked it, but it did mean hauling around other people’s rocks.

  Ah well, he had the back for it. On the far side of forty, Hawk was long-legged and lean-hipped, carrying most of his weight in his shoulders. As long as Sally had known him, he’d never seemed to care enough about his physical appearance to change it. He wore jeans and T-shirts and boots or basketball shoes, and the same round John Lennon glasses he’d favored since she’d first laid eyes on him, more than twenty years ago. He’d never bothered to cut his hair, but tied it back in a thick pony-tail that fell, black streaked with silver now, halfway down his back. His face had developed some seams and crags over the years, and she considered that all to the good. The two of them were the same age, and they both looked it. It worked for them, especially when they were naked.

  The thought of Hawk naked made her smile as she opened the trunk to get the groceries, and he smiled too as he came over and picked up a couple of bags. “How was the Death Trap?” he asked.

  “Lethal,” she said. “I got hosed with bologna water before I got halfway out of my car.”

  “Bologna water?” Hawk asked.

  “Never mind. You’d know it if you saw it,” she said, following him in the door and into the kitchen–dining room to put down the bags. “It’s the liquid generally found in the bottom of a cowboy’s cooler.”

  “Got it,” said Hawk. “Ick.”

  “Yeah, that’s about how it was. The parking lot was a madhouse and the lines were starting to creep back into the aisles. I ran into Amber McCloskey, that student who’s supposedly house-sitting for Edna and Tom. It sounds like she’s already filthied up the place and killed all their plants, and now she’s taking off on a camping trip for two weeks. But she told me not to worry, because some guy named Sheldon Stover had called up saying he was a friend of Edna’s from Princeton, headed this way, and he offered to stay in the house for a couple of weeks.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Hawk said.

  Sally shook her head. “This Stover shows up tomorrow. I’ll go over there and give him the holy word. Jesus, just what this town needs this week, one more damn flat-lander. The Jubilee-ers have arrived.”

  “You make it sound like an invading army,” Hawk said, shrugging off his pack and starting to unload a grocery bag, frowning at the tin of anchovies.

  “They say an army marches on its stomach,” she replied. “And if that’s so, I saw some well-armed people doing their marching. You know Monette?” she asked him.

  “The one who’s Dickie and Mary’s niece, who works down there? Vaguely. Why?”

  “They promoted her to checker trainee, and I ended up in her endless line. When I finally got to unloading my stuff on the check stand, she was making goo-goo eyes at a real horror-show redneck specimen, and by the time she’d checked me out, she’d already started chatting up a ratty little biker with a face like a pocket gopher. Looking for trouble. Hell of a week for it.”

  Hawk tilted his head, thought a minute. “Maybe she’s just clueless. Either way, you might want to say something to Dickie and Mary. Monette’s an orphan or something, isn’t she?”

  “Or something,” said Sally. “Her mother’s dead, and from what I hear, she’d be better off if her father were.”

  “Family values,” said Hawk. “Every time a politician starts in on the subject, it makes me want to check my wallet.” He pulled a jar of pepperoncini and a bottle of cooking marsala out of the bag he was unloading. “Didn’t you buy any real food?”

  Sally laughed. He ate pretty much anything anybody served him, but when it was Hawk’s turn to cook, he liked it straight and simple. “Yeah yeah. I’ve got the peanut butter and jelly.”

  “Good,” he said. “I thought maybe being in mortal danger left you too shell-shocked to shop. Why don’t you make us a lunch and I’ll gas up the truck and we can get going.”

  One of the great things about Laramie was that even at the moment when the town was filling up for the annual week of hell-raising, it took only about five minutes to get out of town, and get into the mountains or the prairie or the desert. And nothing beat being out in the boonies in Wyoming on a July afternoon. After lunch Sally and Hawk headed east on I–80, up into the Laramie Range, aiming for the pink granite hills the locals called Vedauwoo, a word they pronounced “Veeda-voo,” sort of rhyming with “peekaboo.” Rock climbers loved the rugged cliffs, and hikers could follow a hundred different little-traveled trails, or simply head off along streambeds or across meadows toward high places, looking for a view. They’d decided to try a place neither of them had been, identified on Hawk’s topo map as the Devil’s Playground. From the Death Trap to the Devil’s Playground in one day? Playing with fire there, darlin’, Sally thought.

  But the weather was perfect—cloudless big sky, balmy and not too windy, wildflowers everywhere. They walked for hours, mixing easy strolls across the rolling grasslands with scrambles up and down tumbled piles of boulders, catching endless views large and small. Part of the way, to catch some shade, they’d followed the path of a creek, marveling at the delicacy of tiny wood violets and moss. And then, wanting views, they’d hiked up to a sweeping meadow between two jutting granite outcrops. Carpets of tall blue lupines flourished, mixed with delicate fleabane and purple asters, buttery yellow thermopsis and little sawtooth prairie stars. The Indian paintbrush, the state flower and Sally’s favorite, was abundant. There was something impudent and sexy about those clusters of flaming spikes, something that had her shooting a certain kind of look at the man she’d loved twice in her life, including this time. But he was too busy watching birds to catch her drift.

  She looked up. A red-tailed hawk swooped, looking
for prey. Over the outcrop they were headed toward, a half-dozen vultures swung lazily overhead, circling lower and lower.

  “Something dead over there,” said Hawk.

  “Probably a cow. Maybe we should turn around,” said Sally. “I have no desire to hike out there only to end up looking at cattle remains.”

  Hawk shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t think they’re grazing up here. Not that much good grass, and we haven’t seen any cow pies. I think we should take a look.”

  “Why?” said Sally. “It could be anything. This is where the deer and the antelope play. What’s the big deal?” The hair on the back of her neck was standing on end. For no reason at all, she had that big-deal feeling too, but wondered why they’d walk toward death rather than run away from it.

  But Hawk was already walking, his hand on the sheath of the knife he took hiking, fingering the snap, determined to get to whatever they were looking at on the ground. She had a hard time keeping up, half running, panting as she reached the place where the grass began to be broken up with rocks, the terrain turning into flat nooks of grass and dirt ringed by boulders, at the edge of the outcrop. Sally decided this place must be familiar to people who liked to get out in the country to do some of their partying. The grass had been well-trampled, the ground dusty. There was an old fire ring, full of cold ashes and burned beer cans, and a lot more litter than Sally cared to see. Empty Coors cans and the cardboard twelve-pack box. Cigarette butts, empty cigarette packs. An old tin of Skoal chewing tobacco.

  Hawk was already on his way up, making his way over the rocks. When he crawled between two upended boulders and disappeared behind them, she doubled her pace to catch up.

  And then wished she hadn’t.

  There was a sickening, rotten-sweet odor in the air. Hawk stood there, rock-still. Sally’s whole body turned to granite, looking at what he was seeing. Sticking out of a crevice between a jumble of rocks, just below, was the arm of a woman. There was some kind of cord wrapped around her wrist, one long end dangling down.

  “Don’t get any closer,” Hawk finally said.

  It shook her out of her paralysis. “What? We have to. There might be a chance she’s still alive.”

  Hawk cleared his throat. “Sally, she’s not alive. Buzzards have a real good feel for that.”

  But Sally was a woman spellbound. Slowly, carefully, she crawled over the scrambled rocks to the crevice and looked down. At hair the color of a number two pencil, matted with blood.

  Chapter 2

  It’s Just a Shot Away

  Sally straightened up, the peanut butter sandwich she’d had for lunch a new and unpleasant return visitor. Hawk, using his own personal mojo combination of Yankee self-control and desert survivor stillness, had managed to keep from throwing up, but he was white-faced and wide-eyed.

  She knelt down, took off her daypack, and balanced it on a rock. Rooting around, she found a bottle of water. She twisted off the top, took a big swallow, and spat to get rid of the sour taste. No help there. She drank some, then poured half the rest over her head.

  Shit, Monette. Why?

  “We’ve gotta call Dickie,” Sally said at last.

  “Call?” asked Hawk.

  She dug back in the pack and pulled out a cellular phone. She’d given it to Hawk for his birthday, hoping he’d take it with him when he went out in the field, but he’d so far refused to have anything to do with it. He liked being where nobody could reach him. Cell phones, he said, were wrecking the world, cluttering up the land-scape with cell towers, making every place the same as every other.

  “Handy to have that,” he conceded, “but it probably won’t work up here.”

  “Maybe not. It’s worth a try,” she told him. “Every day you see them putting up more towers. We could be in range.” She stuck the phone in the pocket of her shorts and climbed up out of the dip, back through the gap between the two upended rocks, hoping to pick up a relay.

  She turned on the phone, and was relieved to see the icon for the cell tower appear. Punched in 911. A dispatcher answered.

  “My name is S-Sally Alder,” she stammered. “I’m up in Vedauwoo, somewhere around the Devil’s Playground, and, uh, I’ve f-found a body. That is, we’ve found a b-body.” She took a deep gulp of air, exhaled. “Ah, you’d better tell Sheriff Langham to get up here.”

  “Calm down, ma’am,” said the dispatcher. “Can you give me your exact location?”

  That was too much for Sally. About all she knew was that she was in the Laramie Range. When it came to knowing where the hell she was, she usually just looked at the scenery and left the locating to Hawk.

  “Just a minute,” she said, as he came out of the declivity and she handed him the phone.

  While Hawk was unfolding his map, talking to the dispatcher, giving directions to the nearest Forest Service road, Sally entertained a series of irrational thoughts. She should have made a point of talking to Monette right that morning, as she’d watched the girl deal with those guys in the line. Should have warned her. Or she and Hawk should be running around, seeing if they could find whoever had put Monette in the crevice. Or maybe she should pick up all the litter. She stooped down and scooped up an empty cigarette package, shoving it in her knapsack.

  But this was a crime scene. Sally realized suddenly that she shouldn’t mess with anything. She could already see the prints of her hiking boots and Hawk’s on ground scuffed by other shoes, including somebody’s pointy-toed cowboy boots. The cops would want to see those tracks. She’d better sit down.

  Moving toward rational thought, anyhow. And then a rational question occurred to her: What were she and Hawk doing hanging around someplace way out in the outback, with the cops at least an hour away, where one person had already been murdered? How freaking brilliant was that?

  She ran to Hawk, just ending the call with the dispatcher, yanking his arm. “We have to get out of here! What if whoever did this is still around? Come on, hurry—we’ve got to run!”

  Trust Hawk to be reasonable at a time like this. “Run where? We’ve just been calling the cops. They’ll be here in half an hour. If I’d done that”—he tossed his head back in the direction of Monette’s body—“I’d get the hell out, fast. And if, for some reason, I was still hanging around when a couple of hikers showed up, and then heard them phoning for the police, I’d figure it was high time to split.”

  “What do you mean, the cops will be here in half an hour?” Sally demanded. “We’ve been walking all afternoon. How could they get here that quickly?”

  “Sal, we parked all the way back at the Lincoln Summit and set out for a summer stroll. You can get here a lot faster by pulling off the highway at the Vedauwoo exit and then coming up the dirt roads. Trust me, they’ll be here before you know it. And meanwhile, we’re supposed to sit tight.”

  By now she was shivering. He peeled her hand off his arm, so that he could hold her. Dickie Langham and two deputies found them still wrapped together, not quite forty minutes later.

  The outcrop where they stood was only a few hundred yards from the road, but Dickie was huffing and puffing as he walked toward them. That’s what came of being forty pounds over your game weight and smoking two packs of Marlboros a day. Sally had tried to get him to quit smoking, and Dickie’s sister Delice was constantly on his case about losing weight. He always responded that he’d give up smoking when they invented a way where he didn’t have to wear a stupid patch or enter an insane asylum to do it. And as for being overweight, he didn’t see how Delice could put him on the kind of diet where he couldn’t eat the burgers and fries and cattle-men’s coronary breakfasts she was so glad to serve everybody else who came into the Wrangler Bar and Grill, the dance hall and grease haven that Langham women had been running for more than half a century. The fancy food they served at the Yippie I O café, the restaurant in which Delice was a partner with their cousin Burt and his chef boyfriend, was a little healthier than the stuff at the Wrangler, and Delice often cl
aimed it was too wholesome for her taste. So Dickie said he’d rather be fat than a hypocrite like Delice, and that usually shut her up for a while.

  It wasn’t like he was trying to destroy himself. Dickie had done that years ago, when he’d been a beanpole of a coke-dealing bartender who got a little too fond of the merchandise. He’d ended up on the run, gone missing for eleven years, come back to Mary and the kids fatter and wiser and sober and ready, at last, to settle down. He’d never been convicted of a crime, but that fact was more a product of police neglect and incompetence and his own skill at evasion, than of model citizenship. Not everyone would have thought of a law enforcement career under those circumstances, but Dickie had always had an original mind.

  And a warm heart. Maybe that was why the good citizens of Albany County had seen fit to elect him sheriff.

  He took one look at Sally and Hawk and folded them both into one of his patented I’m-big-but-I’m-gentle Dickie Langham hugs. Then he beckoned to a deputy holding a giant travel mug of extra-strength coffee from the Kum ’n’ Go Gas and Convenience Store. “Brought you some coffee,” he said. “Have a jolt while we have a look around, and then we’ll talk.”

  Sally took a swig of the coffee. It was bitter and muddy, but from a chemical standpoint, it worked. She could speak. “You know, don’t you? You know who . . .”

  “Yeah,” said Dickie, his face unreadable, coplike. He’d shifted from friend to pro. “Hawk told the dispatcher. Monette.”

  “We weren’t completely sure,” Hawk explained. “We couldn’t actually see the face. She’s all jammed up in that crack . . . but from the hair, and what we could see of her body, and, well, the uniform.”

  Dickie didn’t say anything, but his eyes shifted. His deputy had clambered up over the rocks and was calling for him. “We’ll take it from here. Stick around. We’re going to want a statement.”