Bad Company

by Virginia Swift

  “Fine. However she got up here, whoever killed her had to drive out of here, back down the hill or on down the road or wherever. Jerry Jeff isn’t driving yet. It’s not just that he’s too young for a license—he and his mother have a running battle over how soon she’ll take him out and start teaching him. He never stops pushing, and she never stops stalling.” Delice wasn’t eager to get into the passenger’s seat of her Explorer with JJ at the wheel, and lately she’d even started hinting to Sally about giving him a lesson or two.

  “At the risk of pointing out the obvious,” said Scotty, “there might have been a third party along. Or maybe he’s covering for somebody. How much do you know about Jerry Jeff’s friends?”

  Sally pursed her lips. “How much does any adult know about a teenager’s friends? Have you talked to Delice?”

  He shook his head. “The sheriff said he’d handle that.”

  “As he should. But I assume you’ve at least gotten some names from JJ, or whoever, and you’re checking them out. Kids at the high school. Rodeo pals.”

  “Yeah. We’re running them down. And tomorrow we’ll be getting the medical examiner’s report on the autopsy, along with the physical evidence. I’m going to ask Jerry Jeff to come down to the courthouse and have a look at that piggin’ string.”

  “And while he’s doing that, you watch his reaction, and then use whatever you decide will work to push him into telling you everything you’re so sure he knows. Tell me, Scotty, do you always treat people like biology class dissection projects? You make me feel like a pithed frog or a cow’s eye.”

  “One more time you force me to apologize,” Atkins said softly. “I’m hoping that when this is all over, we can be friends.”

  Reluctantly she looked up at him. For reasons that he hadn’t divulged and she couldn’t even guess at, Scotty Atkins preferred to show the world a blank face. But this time, for an instant, he failed, and she was drawn to a flickering glimpse of something raw and shredded, somewhere deep beneath the green ice in his eyes.

  Sally was not a woman who hid emotion well, but experience had taught her how to tamp it down some, and use those frontal lobes, when the feelings she harbored were so riotously conflicting that exhibiting them might bring the boys with the straitjacket. “Yeah. Well. Let’s get this over with, and then we’ll see about friends.”

  Plenty left to think about, but nothing more to say. By the time Detective Atkins dropped her off back at the house, she was really wondering. What was this thing she had for pain lately? Except in her very darkest days (when the Vietnam war had poisoned everything she’d once held holy, when tequila and rootlessness had weighed her down), she considered herself a happy person. She was, usually, attracted to the light.

  To the light. Like a moth. Flitting from flame to flame. God, she’d had a rough week. And it was only Thursday.

  It would have been nice if Hawk had been there when she got back. She could have used a little welcome home. But she knew he was planning to stay up in the mountains until it got dark, tramping around the land swap parcel, getting to know the property and its surroundings. He knew how to read land the way Sally read words on paper, alert to subtle signs, faint shades of meaning, traces of past presence. He’d be taking his time.

  The light on the answering machine was going batshit. She listened to the messages.

  “Sally, it’s Maude. I don’t believe for a minute that the break-in at your place was ‘no big thing.’ You’re up to something. Call me.”

  And she thought she’d been so clever. She should have known she couldn’t fool Maude. Now Sally would have to figure out how much, if anything, to tell her. At this point she couldn’t avoid having Maude in her face, but Sally knew it might not be a bad thing to have Maude watching her back.

  “Hey Mustang. Bone Bandy informs me that you and he had a little tête-à-tête this morning in Washington Park. I’d be real interested in hearing your thoughts. There’s a good band at the Torch tonight, and I thought I’d swing by at some point. If you can’t make that, how about breakfast at the Wrangler tomorrow?”

  Dickie Langham, laid back and thinking, like Winnie the Pooh, about breakfast. As usual. But it sounded like he was a step ahead of Scotty on at least one front. Whatever the detective might think, the sheriff, in his own way, was very much on the job. The next message confirmed it.

  Barroom noise—conversational hum, clinking glasses, Willie Nelson on the jukebox. And the distinctive jingle of silver bracelets. “Hey Sal, my brother was just in here acting casual and asking nosy-ass questions about Jerry Jeff. What do you know about all this? What really happened at your house Tuesday night? Goddamn it, I want some answers. It’s already a madhouse in here, but call me at the Wrangler as soon as you can.” A hard hang-up.

  Delice was pissed. Sally couldn’t blame her.

  And now the third Langham sibling, weighing in. “Hey Mustang, Dwayne here. I’ve got some business to take care of, so we’re going to have to do a short practice tonight. Eight instead of seven at my place.” The band would survive, and the Saturday night gig would be fine. It wasn’t as if they were working up a lot of new material. If a song had been written after 1985, the Millionaires didn’t play it.

  The last message was for Hawk. “This is Molly Wood, calling for Josiah Green. I just want to thank you for offering to take a look at that property in the Laramies. I’m eager to hear what you think. I’ll be at home this afternoon and evening, and will hope to hear from you soon. Thanks again.”

  “Eager,” eh? From what little she’d seen of Molly Wood, Sally didn’t think that the woman would use the word loosely. If Molly was eager, somebody might be putting on the real estate blitz. Was that the business Dwayne had mentioned? Or were Molly’s kids pushing? That weekend deal-breaker deadline was closing in. For Molly’s sake, Sally hoped Hawk was finding a mountain paradise, more than up to his exacting aesthetic and scientific standards.

  But she doubted that would be the case. As any decent researcher knew, one look at something was only the prelude to a lot more digging. Even if the property that Dwayne and Nattie’s investors wanted to trade for Molly’s Centennial ranch was the prettiest bit of high woodland on the planet, Hawk wouldn’t be close to knowing everything he’d want to learn about the place.

  She looked at the clock. Since they were pushing practice back, she had time for a bath, the chance to relax for the first time in what had turned out to be another seemingly endless day. Lots of hot water, lots of bubbles, maybe a nice glass of Chardonnay, a spot of dinner. Sounded real good. But instead of heading for the tub, she went over to the desk and switched on the computer. She didn’t feel like soaking just yet. She felt like surfing.

  She did, after all, owe Edna McCaffrey a tin of pâté.

  The modem went through its paces, dinging, beeping, screeching like a monkey, and there she was on the information superhighway, speeding along in an alternative universe.

  First, out of habit, she checked her email. She’d sent word to Edna about the problems with the house and the arrival of Sheldon Stover, but as yet, no reply. Edna was probably in some village literally on top of the world, looking at breathtaking mountains, talking to kids with no shoes and L.A. Lakers T-shirts. Sooner or later, however, she’d check in.

  And then Sally hopped onto the web. No matter what she’d just been doing, it was always like this, cruising the Net—a strange sense of timelessness settled over her as she set out on her journey in the land of lies, damn lies, astounding discoveries, and excess of everything.

  She started out searching on the keyword “pâté de foie gras” and turned up a couple hundred vegetarian and animal rights websites that detailed the horrific force-feeding of ducks and geese, along with several listings for “the last dinner on the Titanic.” So much for her own appetite, but then she’d never been that big a fan of organ meats anyhow. Next she tried “gourmet food,” and this time the results were more appetizing. Somewhere in the first dozen screens amo
ng the hundred thousand sites the search engine fetched up, she found the entry for alicesrestaurant.com.

  Slowly the home page revealed itself. The designers were obviously going for the same effect you could find in those organic/fancy supermarkets that were popping up around the country faster than homegrown alfalfa sprouts: spacious but folksy, healthy but luxurious. Purslane and lambsquarters weren’t weeds, they were salad! Olive oil was good for you! Ice cream was even better if the cows who gave the milk had scenic surroundings and stayed off the needle.

  In one corner of the home page screen was an icon of a smiling, postmillennial middle-aged babe (she looked like Sela Ward in a jogging suit, holding a spatula) and the caption, “Go Ask Alice!” Sally clicked, and was treated to advice about how to find nonsulfited red wines (answer: Go to California), what to do with salmon roe (Eat them and don’t feel guilty; farmed salmon are a dime a dozen), and what new food products were HOT (would you believe that the industry was pushing the idea of gourmet salt?). If they could make salt expensive, what next, water? Oops.

  Pâté was obviously pricey, but at least it had the excuse of having been forced, by hand, into and then out of some hapless goose or luckless duck. Sally clicked on a picture of a stylized cornucopia, captioned “Alice’s Restaurant Emporium,” thinking maybe she’d order some of the costly, grayish-brown stuff Edna loved so much, and Sheldon Stover had gobbled so gauchely.

  That was when her screen turned mostly white, with nothing more than the boringly typed note: URL not located on this server. And then the “fatal error message” and the stern warnings that her computer had done something not simply illegal but immoral, and she was being kicked off the Net and sent to the principal’s office.

  Huh. Must have done something wrong. She powered up the browser again, got as far as the Alice’s Restaurant home page, tried the shopping link again, and once again found herself, cyberspace-speaking, out on the sidewalk with the saloon doors swinging. As they said in pâté land, qu’est-ce que c’est?

  Alice’s place headed for Chapter 11, peut-être?

  Then again, having found that she couldn’t get anything she wanted at Alice’s Restaurant, it might just be a bad day for Alice Wood’s website, or a good one for Sally Alder’s technophobia. When Hawk got home she’d see if he could get the site to work. Meanwhile, she found another gourmet website that promised, on a stack of Bibles, that if Sally ordered fancy French delicacies and gave them her credit card number, she’d get what she’d paid for within the week. Easy as one-two-three. Doing business with them would not enable some lurker to steal her identity, empty out Fort Knox, and pin the rap on her. At least it was improbable. Not that she was paranoid about Internet shopping or anything.

  Shopping, she thought as she shut down the machine, was the least of her worries.

  Chapter 17

  Savoir-faire

  Sally regretted the foreshortening of the Millionaires’ practice that evening. For a change, the band was really on. The drummer was hitting his marks, the fiddler had light in his fingers, and Sally and Sam were singing like their voices wanted to run off and get married. Maybe it was just time to click into gear for the Saturday gig. But whatever it was, they were cooking, in spite of the fact that Dwayne was playing in a trance. He always went into something of an altered state under the influence of music, but tonight he was plain distracted. Still, even with only half his head in the game, Dwayne was solid where the music rocked, and liquid where it rolled.

  There was no small talk, about the real estate deal or anything else. There wasn’t time. They went through a dozen songs and called it a night. Consider it the last light workout before the big game—keep loose, and avoid injury. All things considered, Sally was on schedule.

  The stars were out when she left Dwayne’s house, blankety thick to brighten the black, moonless sky. The air was just cool enough to make Sally’s skin tingle. Out there where Dwayne and Nattie lived, on the fat edge of town, dust still swirled and saplings were still working on growing up to be trees. But when she pulled into the garage of the house on Eighth Street and got her guitar out of the trunk, she paused on the lawn, green grass soft and cool under her feet, to listen to the bleating of the crickets and the murmur of the wind through the canopy of cottonwoods. Hawk had parked his truck out front, instead of in the driveway, so that he wouldn’t be blocking the garage. He thought of stuff like that.

  But she didn’t have much time to contemplate Hawk’s thoughtfulness. A car came screeching around the corner, zoomed down the street, and just as it sped around the next bend, something exploded next to his truck.

  BANG!

  The smell of smoke filled her nostrils. She realized she’d hit the dirt and was crouched behind her guitar case. Yeah, that’d give her a lot of protection from a bullet or a bomb. Maybe she should have taken up the double bass.

  Next thing she knew Hawk had come running out of the house, barefoot, damp hair streaming out behind him, wearing nothing but his jeans. He saw her getting to her feet and hollered, “Hey, are you okay?” When she nodded he sniffed at the smoky air and edged toward the street.

  “Don’t!” she yelled. “Get back in the house!”

  But by now he was walking normally, out into the street, bending down, picking up something—two things. One was an empty beer can. The other, smoldering cardboard and paper, the remains of an M-80, the kind of incendiary device sold at any of the hundred fire-works stands that opened up across the state every summer. And every summer Wyoming kids went crazy buying every conceivable device that could blow their fingers off, assail their eyesight, start fires in the forests, disturb the peace. Business was especially brisk around the Fourth of July, of course, but also during rodeo week. Goddamn kids.

  The pounding of her heart felt like it would crack her chest right open. A firecracker could launch her this close to a coronary? Please.

  Hawk had asked her if she was all right. Yes, damn it, she was. This was ridiculous. She couldn’t say why— maybe it had been the music, or the starry night, or possibly even Scotty Atkins’s callous insistence that she go back up to the mountains and face the devil on his home field. Stupidly, perhaps, she just wasn’t afraid anymore.

  Consider, she told herself, the mighty John Elway. For all those years he’d leaned down to take snaps from center, knowing full well that the game he was playing was designed to send fully a ton of raging, steroid-crazed meat down on him the moment he said, “Hike!” And most of the time he either stood in the pocket and got the pass off, or scrambled out and avoided dismemberment. Elway had lived to win the big one, ride off into the sunset, play golf, cash checks. It was fucking inspirational.

  Whoever was trying to scare the hell out of her had nothing on the Oakland Raiders. She owed it to the Langhams, and Monette, and herself to get a grip.

  Hawk clearly wasn’t standing around, waiting to comfort her in her hour of weakness. He’d headed straight back inside. After a minute she picked up the guitar, squared her shoulders, and followed. Already seated at the desk, he was evidently resuming what he’d been doing before the blast in the street, frowning at the computer, a mug of chicken noodle soup cooling on the desk, a short Jim Beam in one hand and the mouse in the other. “Damn,” he said. “I can’t get this mother to serve up.”

  URL not found.

  And the address in the window was alices restaurant.com, with a bunch of circles and arrows on the end of it.

  With all that she’d been through that day, wasn’t it nice that they were ending up on the same page? “I tried it earlier—nothing doing. I thought I might give them some business with the pâté for Edna, but they lost my sale. What do you think is going on?”

  Hawk took a sip of his whiskey. “Maybe there’s a glitch in their code. Maybe it’s a problem for their web-master to solve. Or maybe you couldn’t get them to sell you anything because they aren’t selling things at the moment, due to some cash flow difficulty. As I understand it, that happens a lot in
the dot.com world. Think about it—you have access to a potentially infinite pool of clients. All you have to do is write up some clever copy and put some pretty pictures up on the web. Next thing you know, you’re a household name. You don’t have to do anything as tawdry as buy actual inventory, deliver the things the people buy, collect the money that your customers owe you, or pay suppliers for the goods. Not to mention cutting paychecks for the tech support people who keep it running, the shipping clerks, the number crunchers. It wouldn’t take much heat at any point to make a cash-poor web business go up in flames.”

  “You think Alice Wood is running a scam?” Sally asked.

  “I don’t know. Whatever she’s up to, she’s not doing business today,” said Hawk. “It could easily be a technical screw-up. At worst, maybe she just got in a tight place. From what Molly said, her daughter wouldn’t shed any tears if she turned Wood’s Hole into cold cash. If she needs money, Alice probably figures that she might as well have her inheritance now as later.”

  He set the whiskey down, logged off the web, and picked up the mug of soup. “It adds up, but maybe my arithmetic’s too simple,” he said, spooning limp noodles and salty yellow broth into his mouth. “After all, if I really had any idea how people got to be Internet millionaires, I wouldn’t be in Laramie, toting rocks and eating canned soup. I’d be sitting on my yacht in Biscayne Bay, trying to decide whether to buy a major league baseball team or take over the lingerie industry.”

  He had a point. Sally and Hawk were doing pretty well for themselves, but with all the education they’d had, as smart as they were, as hard as they worked, it had occurred to them once or twice that it was a real shame they’d never figured out how to get rich.

  “So,” said Sally, picking up Hawk’s glass, leaning against the desk. “Tell me about what you do know. How was your afternoon?”