An Obvious Fact

by Craig Johnson

  “Like being worried that somebody might shoot you in the chest?”

  T.J. glanced at Vic, noting the fact that she had on her sunglasses in the gloom of the annex. “Exactly like that.” Sherwin extended a hand. “How do you feel, Vic?”

  My undersheriff looked dubiously at the hand for a moment and then shook. “Still hung over; how ’bout you?”

  “Just tired. At least hung over means you had fun.”

  She glanced at me.

  • • •

  “You ordered without us?”

  The Bear chewed a bite of his cheeseburger. “Dog was hungry.” He fed him another fry. “He is always hungry.”

  Vic and I pulled out chairs and sat. “We found a plastic cube in Brady’s motel room.”

  Henry wiped his hands on his napkin. “A what?”

  “Plastic cube, about two inches by two inches by two inches—perfectly square and khaki in color. Any ideas?”

  He puzzled. “Hard plastic?”

  “Very.”

  He shrugged. “Let me see it.”

  “DCI’s job. I gave it to Mike Novo to ship off just now.”

  Dragging another fry through the ketchup, he fed it to Dog. “Nothing else?”

  “Nope, no more wire equipment, computer, nothing.” The waitress arrived, and we ordered up. “Somebody destroyed the place, and I’m assuming they got everything.”

  “Except the cube. Whatever that is.”

  I glanced out the window at the comings and goings of a couple thousand motorcycles in the early evening. “He hid it in the light fixture, so he knew it was a possibility that someone was going to be looking for it.”

  The Bear nodded and split the last fry with Dog. “It would be nice if we had access to the ATF agent’s control officer. It is possible that he might know what Post was working on.”

  I leaned back in my seat. “I’m still waiting on McGroder to get back to me.”

  Vic rested an elbow on the table, pushing a wave of blue-black hair from her face and supporting her chin with a palm. “How?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “How is he supposed to get in touch with you?”

  Satisfied with myself, I smiled and patted my jacket pocket. “I’ve got Bodaway Torres’s cell phone.”

  “Have you checked it?” I suddenly felt a little less sure of myself as she reached over and pulled the phone from my pocket, thumbed a few buttons, and studied the screen as the waitress came back with our drinks and I sipped my iced tea.

  The Cheyenne Nation studied Vic, still wearing her sunglasses. “How is your head?”

  “Shitty. How’s yours?”

  “Fine, but I did not drink a vat of dirty martinis last night.”

  She turned the screen toward me. “Eight phone messages and three texts from the regional office in Denver, Colorado, of the FB of I.”

  “Oh.”

  “You hit the button that silenced it.”

  “Oh.”

  The phone suddenly spoke. “Hello?”

  Vic gestured with the device. “Take it; it’s McGroder.”

  I took the thing and held it to my ear. “Hey, Mike.”

  “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been trying to get you for what seems like days.”

  “This cell phone thing is kind of new to me. Have you got something?”

  “This is a shit storm of incomparable magnitude, and none of us have an umbrella. This Post guy was a real deal, and an undercover operative for the last thirteen years with all the biker gangs. He was involved in a major bust on weapons in the Southwest, but evidently he had gotten into something even bigger.”

  “Like what?”

  “The control officer wouldn’t say.”

  “So big the ATF won’t tell the FBI?”

  “Apparently.”

  I thought about it. “What’s he want done with Post?”

  “Amazingly enough, he went along with your assessment of the know-and-go, but get ready because he’s on his way there.”

  “Coming to Hulett?”

  “Left today from Phoenix.”

  “Okay.”

  “His name is John Stainbrook.” There was a long pause, and I listened as the FBI man shuffled papers on his desk. “Walt, don’t jerk this guy around; he’s the real juice, and unless you and your pals up there in the Wild West want to end up in an undisclosed facility in the Arizona desert, just tell him everything you know.”

  “Well, that won’t take long, considering we don’t know a lot.” I reached down to pet Dog. “Hey, Mike, we found something in Post’s motel room—”

  “You searched his room?”

  “Don’t worry about it; we weren’t the first. Anyway, we found a plastic cube, khaki in color, about two inches square—any idea what that might be?”

  He sighed. “Walt, are you on drugs?”

  “That’s the only thing of interest we found.”

  He sighed. “I have no idea.”

  “Oh, well. Maybe the Stainbrook guy can help us out.”

  “There’s one more thing.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Post wasn’t alone.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “The ATF has two undercover agents there in Hulett.”

  • • •

  I watched as Henry continued to tinker with the metal detector we’d purchased at High Plains Pawn, in an attempt to get the thing to light up or do something that might indicate it was operable.

  Vic looked out the window of the Dodge at the gathering gloom of one of suburban Rapid City’s nicer neighborhoods, her eyes rising to the gigantic cottonwoods that wreathed the street. “I figure if I lived in a place like this I’d shoot myself.”

  “Why?”

  “The incredible normalcy of it.” She turned to look at me. “So, two ATF birds in one bush? Any guesses?”

  “Not a one.”

  “So, this is not an informant or someone but an actual secret agent?”

  “I don’t think they call them secret agents.”

  “I know, but I like the sound of it—makes it sound espionage-y and shit.”

  I let that one settle. “According to McGroder and this John Stainbrook character, there are two undercover operatives.”

  “Undercover operatives—I like that, too.” She went back to watching a particular house down the street. “Well, be careful what you wish for; an hour ago you were wishing you could talk to these ATF guys about what Post was working on, and now you’ve got his boss hotfooting it up here.”

  “It must be important.” I turned and looked at the Cheyenne Nation. “How’s it going?”

  “I do not know.” He put the top back on the plastic case and pushed a button, which resulted in a high-pitched squeal from the thing. “I think it is working.” He extended the wand with a disc on it toward the dash, and the thing started screaming again.

  “Can you turn the volume down?”

  Vic peered at the instrumentation on the Dodge. “Wow, who would’ve figured there was real metal in the dash.”

  The Bear adjusted the knob and fiddled some more. “It is set on the highest level of sensitivity, but I will adjust it when we get on the lawn.”

  Vic glanced at the sky. “Dark enough?”

  I pulled the door handle and climbed out. “Unless we’re going to hang around here all night.” I met the two of them at the back of the pumpkin chiffon muscle car, the perfect vehicle for undercover work. “It must be the Tudor-looking one three houses up—the one next to the house with the cars parked on the lawn.”

  Vic shook her head as Henry continued to calibrate the metal detector. “So, tell me again what the hell we’re doing out here?”

  I opened the trunk and pulled out the new shov
el I’d purchased at Shipton’s Ranch Supply. “When I was talking to Engelhardt, he said that one of the run-ins he had had with Billy ThE Kiddo was when he shot his neighbor’s lawn mower with a .40 Glock. Post was shot with a .40, so I thought we’d get the slug and hand it over to DCI and see if they could get a match—case solved.”

  She looked at the oversized lawns. “You’re kidding.”

  I closed the trunk and balanced the shovel on my shoulder. “Got a better idea?”

  She studied the house next to the Tudor. “Yeah, we get a warrant, go into the jackass’s house, find the gun, and hand it over to DCI for testing.”

  “You think he’s stupid enough to still have it?”

  “I think he’s stupid enough to open a wholesale stupid store and sell franchises.”

  Following the Bear, I started off down the street. “Well, if this doesn’t work—”

  She sighed and brought up the rear.

  Staying to the far side of Kiddo’s house, Henry dropped the wand and started detecting, moving it across the newly mown grass, whereupon it squealed softly and the yellow light on the instrument panel lit up. “A little too sensitive.” He recalibrated it again, but this time the thing did nothing at all. “Hmm, a little too desensitized perhaps.”

  While he fiddled with the adjustments, Vic and I looked around. There were no lights on in either of the two houses, and it looked as though there was no one home in either one.

  She leaned against a large cottonwood and studied the Kiddo abode. “So, in a nice neighborhood, this asshole parks his cars and motorcycles in the yard.”

  There was a noise behind us, and I turned to see Henry waving the metal detector over a small patch of God’s little acre. I walked over. “Something?”

  “Possibly.”

  Looking around one last time, I placed the edge of the blade into the turf and dug in. I lifted a chunk of sod, tipped it to the side, and then stomped another shovel full from the ground, carefully placing it beside the hole for reinterment. “How far down does that thing read?”

  He shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  I shoveled again and this time felt something scrape. I handed the spade to Henry, took out my Maglite, shined it in the hole, and poked around, finally recovering an old railroad spike. “Hmm.”

  “Not what we are looking for?”

  “No.” I returned the dirt to the hole and then replaced the sod, stomping on it, as the Bear continued working the massive lawn. “This is going to take all night.” I glanced around for Vic, but she’d obviously gotten bored and wandered off.

  The machine made another noise, and I followed Henry to a spot about twenty feet away and repeated the procedure, which resulted in another spike. “What’d we find, the transcontinental railroad here?”

  He shrugged again and moved on, but after another five railroad spikes, I was losing my enthusiasm. “I don’t suppose you could dial that thing down again?”

  “I could, but the difference between a railroad spike and a slug might be beyond this particular model’s abilities.” He adjusted the thing again. “It would be helpful if we had an approximate area where the shooting took place.”

  “Yep, I know.”

  I looked up and could see Vic standing just a little ways away.

  “How’s it going?” She stepped closer and raised a glass to her lips, sipped some wine, and glanced around in the darkness. “Don’t quit your day job.”

  It took me a moment to ask. “I’m almost afraid to know, but where’d you get the wine?”

  “Earl Heiple, who owns the yard we’re digging in.”

  “Did you go introduce yourself to Mr. Heiple?”

  “I did. He was reading in his den, so I knocked on his back door.”

  “And he gave you a glass of wine?”

  “He’s ready to give you one, too. He says he hates that riotous prick next door.” She paused. “He’s like a hundred years old, but called Kiddo a riotous prick—used those exact words.” She took another sip. “I like him.”

  “He didn’t happen to tell you where Billy ThE shot the lawn mower, did he?”

  She gestured with the wineglass. “Yeah, out there in the middle someplace; he said he’d show us.”

  • • •

  “They used railroad ties near the sidewalk. They backfilled the front lawn in ’27, but I guess the spikes are still there.”

  “Has your family always lived here?”

  He nodded his gray head and pushed his glasses farther up on his nose. “Fourth generation South Dakota.”

  He noticed Henry’s glass was a little low and reached an unsteady hand out to pour the Bear a little more cabernet. “This is the 2012—it’s very good.”

  “Thank you.”

  He gestured toward my glass, but I waved him off and he smiled. “I would’ve thought all that digging would’ve given you a thirst.”

  I returned the smile. “So, you didn’t know we were out there?”

  “Not until this beautiful young lady appeared at my door.”

  I picked up my glass and took a sip. “I’m thinking I should be apologizing.”

  He set the bottle back on the counter. “No need.”

  The house was massive and well furnished, the kitchen a wooden structure that had been added on to the backside of the stone house, a precaution that had been made in the days when such rooms periodically burnt down. His den looked to be an old porch that had been converted, and I couldn’t help but wonder why he appeared to live the majority of his life in the more modest portions of the huge house.

  I glanced around the kitchen—homey, but a little run down. “You live here alone?”

  He nodded and sat on a stool opposite the three of us. “Ever since Evelyn died seventeen years ago.”

  “Children?”

  “A son in Florida and a daughter in Alabama; I think the Midwest winters took a toll on them.” He sighed and looked around. “It’s a museum, I know. They keep trying to get me to move, but so far I’ve resisted. I’ve lived here my whole life, and I’m not sure I’d know myself anywhere else.”

  The Cheyenne Nation warmed to the old man. “What did you do? For a living.”

  He gestured toward the book lying on the counter to our left, Herodotus’s The Histories. “I taught world history at Black Hills State.”

  “‘Men trust their ears less than their eyes.’”

  He nodded and looked sad. “He is rather one-sided, but he’s still the most reliable historian of the ancient world.” The old scholar considered me. “I find it hard to believe that a Wyoming sheriff quotes Herodotus.”

  “It’s a magnificent book.”

  He placed a wrinkled hand lovingly on the tome. “I read it periodically to convince myself that we live in more civilized times.”

  “Where people shoot each other’s lawn mowers?”

  “‘From great wrongdoing there are great punishments from the gods.’” He glanced at me through the tops of his bifocals. “Are you here to punish wrongdoers?”

  “Yep.”

  He stood and moved toward the door, and we followed. “The Kiddos were marvelous people, but their son’s actions have always been questionable, to say the least.”

  We gathered our primitive equipment from the back stoop, and I watched as Vic surreptitiously slipped an arm through one of his, carefully steering him along the sidewalk toward the front lawn.

  The old fellow was spry enough and led us to a spot near the property line but thankfully with an obstructed view of Billy’s house next door. “I was mowing the grass myself when he came out of his house shooting like a madman. I think the first shot landed somewhere out near the middle of the lawn, but the second I’m sure of since it missed my foot by only a yard or so.” He tapped a house shoe on a spot in the grass. “I would say here.”

/>   The three of us stepped back, and Henry ran the wand over the patch; the device immediately squealed and lit up.

  I stepped forward with the shovel and repeated the procedure. I was starting to feel like a grave digger.

  He watched me. “How far will a bullet go into the ground?”

  I looked up at him. “Usually about a foot, depending on the weapon and the composition of the soil.” I shoveled out another scoop. “Rocks can deflect a bullet quite a ways, so you can never be completely sure where they might go. How far away was he when he fired?”

  He thought about it. “Twenty yards. He was truly crazed.”

  I scooped out another. “He still is.”

  Henry moved in and passed the wand over the hole, but the detector didn’t respond. We looked at each other, and then he waved the thing over the pile of dirt I’d shoveled to the side; suddenly, it lit up and squealed.

  “Bingo.” I kneeled down and began sifting through the dirt with my fingers, feeling for the slug. “I’d say your powers of recollection are pretty amazing, Mr. Heiple.”

  He stood there, arm in arm with my undersheriff. “Perhaps, but if you’ve ever been shot at, and I’m sure you have, you tend to remember it.” He paused for a moment and then continued, almost apologetically. “I was with Company One, Thirty-third Armored Regiment, Third Armored Division, First U.S. Army in the Battle of the Bulge. We were raw recruits brought in to replace the men who had been killed in the initial German offensive. On my first night, there we were deployed in the third Sherman tank that my crew had been given, the first two having been destroyed. We were guarding the fuel dump at Francorchamps above Stavelot late one night. I was smoking a cigarette and listening to the bats flying around my head outside my assistant-driver hole. After a moment the older and much more experienced driver poked his head out of his hatch, looked at me, and said, “You do know you’re being shot at with that damned cigarette, don’t you?” So I threw it over the side and scrambled in; then he told me that I’d just flicked a lit cigarette into a field of cans containing 124,000 gallons of gasoline.”