“I’ll kill this bitch, I swear it, Langham. But I’d rather have you.” He rammed the barrel of the gun yet harder, knocking against the base of Sally’s skull. The pain penetrated a little of her shock, and for the first time, her eyes focused and she saw Hawk. He looked hard at her and told her silently, with a very slight shake of his head, to think, and to be ready.
Several in the crowd shuffled, and Danny yelled “SHUT UP!” again. “I swear, anyone here makes one move, and she’s dead.”
Dickie’s eyes had gone dull and cold, but his voice came friendly and laid back. “Let her go and I’m all yours, Crease,” he said, moving slowly toward the front and wondering how he could signal somebody to create a distraction. “But don’t you want to stay and try the hors d’oeuvres?”
At the mention of hors d’oeuvres, Burt and John-Boy shot each other a look of panic. Frozen to the floor, they’d forgotten all about the pizza puttanesca. John-Boy’s sensitive nose caught the first whiff of burning anchovies, olives, semolina crust, and lobster morsels. The anchovies and cornmeal burst into flame first. In a heartbeat, a cloud of black oily smoke rolled out of the brick hearth, and people began to tear up and cough. Even Danny Crease felt the tears gushing out of his eyes, his lungs seizing up and spasming.
Finding some last reserve of energy and, remarkably, some remnant of a women’s self-defense course she’d taken twenty years ago in Berkeley, Sally stomped hard on Danny’s instep just as Hawk Green hit him with a tackle at the knees and Tom Youngblood wrenched the Beretta from his hand. The gun went off, a bullet flying through the front window, spraying a shower of glass over the street. Byron Bosworth, who was watching the whole thing from a barstool across the street at the Buckhorn, choked on a pickled egg.
As Danny went down, he decided he’d take as many of these subhumans with him as he could. He managed to get a hand in his pocket, and pressed the bomb control as people rushed out the door past him, coughing and crying. But nothing happened. When the smoke cleared, all Danny saw was Sally Alder huddling in the arms of one of the guys who’d hit him, two guys holding blackened, smoking pizza pans, and about a dozen party-goers—fine, well-armed citizens—pointing their pistols at him. The sheriff was yanking him up, pulling his hands behind his back, cuffing him tight. The bomb control clattered to the floor. The sheriff’s sister, holding a Colt .45, put her face right up to Danny’s and said, “We’ll bill you for the damage.”
Then Steve Baca came walking up, black eyes glowing, holding Danny’s defused pipe bomb. “Pretty primitive device,” said the fire chief to the piece of slime being hauled off the floor. “Did you leave any more of these around here?”
Chapter 34
Ride Me High
“You want a beefsteak for that eye?” asked Hawk Green as he eased Sally into the big tub full of bubbles in Meg Dunwoodie’s green bathroom, handed her two Advils and an extra-large whiskey, sat down on the floor next to the tub, and dipped a washcloth in the water.
“Does steak really help?” Sally asked, wincing as he gently touched the washcloth to her battered face.
“Probably not, but it has the ring of folk wisdom, doesn’t it?”
Sally tried to grin through an upper lip that was split and swelling fast. She failed. Her ribs ached, but Doc Anderson, who’d fortunately been among those pounding down spring rolls and champagne at the Yippie I O, said nothing was broken.
“I think ice would be better.” An arm snaked through the half-open bathroom door, holding a Ziploc bag full of ice. “Reduces the swelling.”
“What are you doing here, Maude?” Sally mumbled. “It’s eleven o’clock at night.”
“I was watching the ten o’clock news from Cheyenne and they had a story about a ‘hostage crisis’ at a restaurant opening in Laramie. I called Delice, and she told me what happened . I came to see if you were all right,” Maude said from behind the door. “Are you?”
“Yeah, I’m great,” Sally said. “Goddamn it, Hawk, go easy on that eye with the ice.”
“Yeah, Hawk. What are you trying to do, kill her?” came another voice from behind the door.
“That’s right, Sheriff,” said Hawk sourly. “This is her bonus day for attempted murders. Why aren’t you down at the jail, beating the shit out of your prisoner?”
“I’m leaving that to the FBI. They’ll be here in the morning,” Dickie answered.
“Everything’s under control here,” said Hawk. “You can leave the flowers, candy, and bottles of bourbon in the kitchen. We’re not receiving visitors.”
Suddenly the door burst open, and in flew Delice Langham, all ajangle, with half a Telstar worth of red ginger blossoms, orchids, and birds-of-paradise. “God, Sally, are you all right?”
“Never better,” Sally managed, tilting the whiskey into the good side of her mouth. Maude reached in and took the flowers from Delice.
Edna McCaffrey peeked her head around the door. “Hey, this is like one of those sixteenth-century French salons where everybody would come into some noblewoman’s boudoir and stand around watching her drop bon mots while she put on her underwear,” she said.
“Fresh out of bon mots,” Sally said, draining the glass.
“Can’t a man give a woman a bath around here without having half of Laramie show up?” Hawk complained.
“Get out,” Sally said.
“We’re glad you’re not dead,” Delice said cheerfully as they all began to leave. “But the Yippie I O is a mess!”
“And I was just congratulating myself on how boring my life was,” Sally commented.
Considering the number of half-hysterical, armed people who had been present at the eventful opening night of the Yippie I O, it was a downright miracle nobody got shot. There was, unfortunately, one fatality. The bartender at the Buckhorn had been unable to dislodge the large piece of pickled egg from Byron Bosworth’s trachea, and he expired on the barroom floor. Bosworth’s funeral was very well attended, said Edna McCaffrey, who had to go.
Sally Alder was recovering from the assault by Danny Crease, under the care of Hawk Green, Maude Stark, and a surprising number of people who considered Sally a friend. Even Nattie Langham showed up with a summer sausage giftpack from Hickory Farms (Sally suspected someone had sent it to Nattie and Dwayne for Christmas and they’d never gotten around to eating it).
Danny Crease had been transferred to the more secure state penitentiary at Rawlins. In the wake of the Freedom Ranch debacle, the Teton County sheriff had done some investigating into the deaths of Walt Flanders and Mickey Welsh, both associates of the late Elroy Foote. As a result, Danny was awaiting trial on multiple charges of murder, attempted murder, arson, and assault. Dickie was also looking into the murders of the Mexican nationals on the Snowy Range Road. He had no evidence to connect Danny with those killings, and probably would never be able to make anybody pay, in those cases. He really hoped Danny had been involved. He didn’t want to think there might be somebody else out there, murdering helpless people in his county.
On Danny’s second day at Rawlins, he received a bill for repairs to the Yippie I O from Delice, in the amount of $12,500.
The United States Justice Department confiscated the Harrier, the tank, and several suspicious vials found in the refrigerator at Freedom Ranch. The vials were being transported, under extremely secure conditions, to the laboratories of the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.
Mrs. Pamela Appley of Sun Valley, Idaho was suing the Teton County Sheriff’s Office, the Wyoming Division of Criminal Investigations, the FBI, the ATF, and the United States Forest Service for violating her parents’ civil rights.
CNN and several other news outlets were suing the federal government and the estate of Elroy Foote to get money to pay off the workers’ compensation claims of the camera crews and correspondents deafened by the blast at Freedom Ranch.
Brittany Langham had decided to do something with her life, but she wasn’t exactly sure what. She had written for applications to the Univer
sity of Wyoming School of Law, the graduate program in history at the University of California, Berkeley, and the FBI Academy.
Bobby Helwigsen had received a $250,000 advance from a major publishing house for a book prospectively titled, Teton Thunder: My Year Inside the Militia. He was being represented by the William Morris Agency, and was considering offers including a nationwide radio call-in program and a series of infomercials for products including the Butt-Blaster.
During the next several weeks, the Dunwoodie Foundation agreed to seek Historic Register designation for Meg’s house, and to transfer the papers to the archives after one more year. Egan Crain would act as chief curator. The Giselle Blum paintings from the closet were to be the centerpieces for an exhibit of the artist’s work at the University Art Museum; while Brit waited to hear from her various schools, she had been hired to write the catalogue copy. The Dunwoodie diamonds had been removed from the vault at the Centennial Bank, and sent via armed courier to a De Beers, Ltd. office in New York, to see if they could be identified.
The Yippie I O Cafe reopened on the Fourth of July. The sushi special was red-white-and-blue rainbow rolls. The Langham boys—Dickie, Dwayne, Josh, and Jerry Jeff—ate four entire rolls apiece. Steve Baca ordered the green chile chicken pizza. Delice hoped that didn’t mean he was getting homesick for New Mexico.
Sally Alder’s inquiry regarding Margaret Dunwoodie and Ernst Malthus was sitting in an unopened manila envelope at the State Department office that reviewed Freedom Of Information Act requests. It was somewhere in the middle of a large pile of similar envelopes.
And Edna McCaffrey and Tom Youngblood returned, for what was left of the summer, to Katmandu.
Hawk was wrestling the last of Sally’s boxes out of Meg Dunwoodie’s house, and into his pickup. She was finally taking a bunch of her work stuff to an office on campus. She planned to split her time between Meg’s house and the office, spending the year writing the biography of Laramie’s greatest poet, Margaret Parker Dunwoodie. She was moving her other stuff into Hawk’s house. It would be a little cramped. They would probably have to look for a bigger place.
“Well, we don’t need to look right away,” Sally hedged. “What if I decide to go back to UCLA?”
“You ain’t goin’ nowhere,” said Hawk. “Ride me high, and all that Bob Dylan stuff.”
Sally looked at Hawk. He looked back. She moved toward him. He stood his ground. She put her arms around his neck. He put his arms around her waist. He leaned down and kissed her very sweetly, then very thoroughly.
“I’m moving in with you, Hawk,” she murmured into his ear. “What does this mean?”
“You pay half the mortgage,” he whispered back into her ear.
She looked disappointed.
“Don’t worry,” he said, “It’s a good deal. I put down a lot of cash.”
“You do love me, don’t you?” she had to ask.
“Yeah, I do. I do love you. Now let’s get this crap over to my house. I want a beer.”
Maude Stark had decided that Meg’s backyard needed a white lilac bush. There was a stand of gladioli that Meg had insisted on putting in, which had never worked out. They were taking up a space that would be perfect for the lilac.
Maude put her shovel under the spindly gladiola shoots and dug deep enough to get under the bulbs. She put them in a plastic pot, thinking maybe there was a place she could transplant them in Hawk (and Sally’s) yard. It was good to get out and dig, she thought, working the dirt around the hole loose, and digging deeper, piling dirt outside the hole, making room for the roots of the lilac. Her shovel struck something hard.
Maude bent down and began sifting in the dirt with her hands. Her fingers found it, and she pulled it out of the dirt and wiped it off. One gold Krugerrand. What do you know?
Maude put it in her pocket and began to dig deeper, then thought about it a minute. The hole was already deep enough for a lilac bush. She pulled the coin out of her pocket and dropped it in the bottom of the hole. Shoveled in a little more dirt. Cut the bag off the roots of the lilac, and gently placed it in the hole. Then just as gently, she pushed the rest of the dirt back in the hole, mounding it around the trunk to support the bush. It wouldn’t bloom until next year, she thought, going to the potting shed to get some fertilizer.
A Disclaimer, and Many Acknowledgments
This is a work of fiction. Laramie is a real place, and some of the places in and around Laramie are real, but the people are pure products of my own fevered imagination.
Many thanks:
To Maria Montoya, for an evening in a cabin in the high Rockies when I told this story, and who said, “Oh, you’ve gotta write it.” To Beth Bailey, Melissa Bokovoy, Hal Corbett, Henry Levkoff, Jeff Limerick, Valerie Matsumoto, Harriet Moss, Craig Pinto, and Peter Swift, who read the book and gave me all kinds of suggestions, which I should have taken.
To Kathy Jensen and Audie Blevins, who’ve offered me a home away from home for twenty years. And to more Wyoming friends: Katie Curtiss and Hal Corbett, Karen Marcotte and Jon Myers, Colin and Roxanne Keeney, Bev Seckinger, Janice Harris. All this is made up, of course, but it kind of rings true, don’t you think?
To Tom Baumgartel, Catherine Kleiner, and Jon “Mad Dog” Myers for keeping the music alive.
To Richard White, for giving kindly hardheaded advice and the chances of a lifetime. To Elaine Koster, my agent, whose faith in this book and me amazes me still. To
Carolyn Marino, my editor, who is teaching me how to write. To my excellent colleagues in the History Department at the University of New Mexico and in the Western History Association, who keep me crazy after all these years.
To Sam and Annie Swift, the world’s finest children. To the Swift, Scharff, and Levkoff families, who matter most of all.
To Peter “the Rocket” Swift, companion on all twenty thousand roads, and off-road for that matter, my love.
About the Author
Virginia Swift teaches history at the University of New Mexico. She also writes nonfiction under the name of Virginia Scharff. She lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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Praise for Virginia Swift and BROWN-EYED GIRL
“A dazzling, dangerously funny debut from Virginia Swift, Brown-Eyed Girl has a rich voice, a wonderful sense of the modern West, and tons of attitude. With this book, Virgina Swift threatens to do for Wyoming historians what Janet Evanovich has done for New Jersey bounty hunters.”
Stephen White, author of Cold Case
“A sexy novel set in the wide-open town of Laramie, Wyoming. Bawdy and suspenseful with a wonderful literary mystery buried in the middle, this debut novel promises a solid career ahead for Ms. Swift.”
Margaret Maron
“A soaring debut from Swift, who combines a bittersweet romance, resumed after a twenty-year hiatus, with academic infighting, paramilitary paranoia, and a puzzle dating back to WWII.”
Kirkus Reviews
“As much a mainstream story of two gutsy Wyoming women as it is a mystery, Swift’s first novel captivates . . . Swift develops her engaging tale gracefully, with a real feel for the atmosphere of its Wyoming setting.”
Publishers Weekly
“A welcome, distinctive new voice.”
Poisoned Pen
“Swift has written a story to capture some of the romantic-thriller market currently owned by Tami Hoag and Nora Roberts. Brown-Eyed Girl should appeal to fans of those authors and more.”
Rocky Mountain News
“Sally and the mysterious, marvelous Meg Dunwoodie are great characters.”
Toronto Globe and Mail
“A delightfully heterogeneous cast . . . This witty, warm, engrossing first novel is highly recommended.”
Library Journal
“Entertaining . . . Swift certainly provides plenty of color in terms of characters and setting.”
London Times
; Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
BROWN-EYED GIRL. Copyright © 2000 by Virginia Scharff. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition OCTOBER 2011 ISBN: 9780062133533
Print Edition ISBN: 0061030309
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